Category: Fiction

Work

Short Story: A Tragedy

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I hurt. Everyday. They tell me that it’s “normal,” a part of disease. They say the aches and pains that incise my kidneys, steal air from my lungs, are expected, routine. The seizures that grip me, take control of my body away, and leave me feeling more exhausted than I could if I’d run for leagues more than miles. But supposedly, they’re “in line” with a prognosis.

Bullshit. None of this is normal, or routine, except that I’m dying. That’s what we do. We die. But I’m dying the most terrible kind of death, the kind where no-one can do a damned thing about it or even figure out why. I’ve spent months in and out of hospitals, chained to beds by I-Vs, Heart monitors, and catheters.

Do you know the pain or humiliation of a torn catheter? Or even what one is? It’s a tube they shove into your urethra. You know, that thing you piss with? I haven’t gone to the bathroom in almost a year. And don’t get me started on sponge baths.

You know that joke that guys like to tell; “Nurse, I’m ready for my sponge bath?” Well it’s all in good fun, until you wake up in the middle of the night, covered from ass to neck in shit from a year’s worth of liquid diets and hospital food, and have to have one. It’s not funny then. Or the other three-hundred odd times, with a different nurse every two nights.

But you know what’s worse? Even worse than the drugs that make you puke, or the humiliation of being on-display for med-staff 25 hours a day, or constant, nagging pains that cut and stab at you day and night, cause you to scream, cry, or rage through the morphine? You know what’s worse? Having a perfectly able body whither away before you– your perfectly able body.

When I first entered the hospital, before the misdiagnoses of metastasized carcinomas, leukemias, and a half-dozen other, terrifying cancers, I was two-hundred pounds of tonka-tough American muscle. I worked eighty-hour weeks as a welder, union-born and bred. I bled excellence and I sweat green. I had a half-mil house, a stunning wife, and two teenaged kids that’d managed not to fuck up their lives with dope or booze. I was living the American dream.

But like that great philosopher Carlin once said, they call it that ’cause you gotta’ be asleep to believe it. Christ what a wake-up call I got.

Have you ever seen a man, so big, strong, tough, that the only person you can think to compare him to’s a guy like Schwarzenegger? Well that was me. I may not’ve had the chiseled jaw, or that lady-killing Austrian accent, but I damn near had the rest. I was him. He was me. But that first episode? None of that meant jack-shit.

You know what they say about the bigger they are? Well, when I fell, I almost took a whole damned gas plant with. No bullshit. Working with an open flame, spot welding in a natural gas refinery carries its own set’a risks, but no-one ever expects to suddenly find themselves out of control of their body, seizing on the ground next to a flailing torch that’s half-cutting through a hot gas line. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I’d managed to cut the damn gas line to the torch in my state.

A plume of fire was roasting the air that was barely making it into my lungs, but the torch wasn’t strong enough to breach the full gas line ’cause of it. And thank fuck for those reinforced tanks. If it weren’t for their double-insulated walls, that gas would’ve exploded, caused a chain-reaction and taken the whole plant down with it. Of course, it would’ve spared me the agony that came next, but even with it, I can’t imagine having all that death on my shoulders. Even dead. Foreman said something later about 2,000 guys on-site, and I was the only one sick that day. Fuck, that would’a been a catastrophe.

The local paper did an interview with me not long after. They’d heard about the incident, wanted to try and drum up some of their own brand of fear mongering. They sent some hot-shot reporter girl over to try and make a fuss about the safety regulations. Christ, she could’a been my daughter. Fresh outta’ college and making those squinty, suspicious eyes at me. She sat me down to ask “hard” questions, but was stunned when all I gave her was the real truth. She batted her lashes a few times too. I guess she hoped I’d cave, screw the union and the gas company over.

I didn’t. There wasn’t anything to say. It wasn’t the job. It was me. They say accidents don’t really happen, but no one can predict just dropping to the floor and frothing at the mouth. As far’s I know, not much of that interview made it into the paper beyond a few of my own words. Guess they didn’t quite get the reaction they were hoping for.

That was when the Union began its own investigation. I talked to the rep that was in charge of the whole thing. He said it was a “formality” thing. Bullshit again. The gas company wanted to make sure they couldn’t blame me, sue my pants off, and take my benefits away. The Union rep eventually made sure to note there was nothing at fault on my end, beyond my obvious ailment. Legally, they couldn’t touch me for that.

What did it matter though? Through all that, I went from one doctor’s office to the next, every other night in the ER for seizures, chest-pains, near-on strokes. I guess something just wasn’t quite wired right in my brain. Maybe ol’ Pop’s genes were finally hittin’ their stride, givin’ me some of his late-life ills. I don’t know. But then again, neither does anyone else.

The first time I noticed the weight loss, I was being weighed at a specialist’s office. I was down to one-ninety, skin sagging and muscle half-eaten away already. He was one of the many specialists, I might add. In the end, he was about as useless as the rest of ’em, but only the first of the neuro-specialists I’ve had the great displeasure of meeting. That was the first time I heard about MRIs and EEGs. If only I’d known what fun those couple of words would end up being. Turns out, when you’ve got twenty year old ink in your arms from shitty, basement tattoos as a teenager, some of them might turn out to have metal in them.

The first time I had an MRI, it damn near ripped the skin off my arm. To their credit, everyone in the hospital freaked. They treated me good about it. They’re always nice like that– like they want to get you better, but really you know all they care about’s what the rest of us care about; putting your time in to clock out so you can go bang your spouse and fall asleep with a beer afterward. I can’t blame them for that though. That’s the human condition. That, and I’m pretty sure it wrecked the machine. Not many men can lay claim to causing a million dollars of damage in under thirty seconds.

After that, I spent three-months between the main bullshit and having to get my earliest tattoos removed and skin grafted on. You know where they took that skin from? My ass. That’s right. So now, not only was I bandaged on my arms, seizing three to four times a day, in and out of the ER and Doctor’s offices every other day and night, now I was walking around with a gimp because my ass hurt. Talk about shit or get off the pot. Hell, I couldn’t even sit on one.

At least I can look back on that and laugh. The rest ? All I can do’s shake my head.

That American dream I was talking about? It took a while– well, not really– but it unraveled into the nightmare we all knew it could really be. Almost as soon as things took a turn for the worst, I found out each of my kids were gettin’ into trouble– Son was boozing it up, and my Daughter was smokin’ pot on school grounds.

I guess I can’t blame ’em. They’re just kids and they don’t know better. Don’t have the “tools” to handle the kind of fuckery old dad’s health’s put ’em through. My wife on the other hand… The less said the better, but from what I understand, she’d fit right in with some of the army-wives that marry off just before their husbands’ deployments.

Whatever. Water under the bridge I guess. We’re all destined to do two things alone in this life anyhow; shit, and die. Well, I’ll have the latter covered anyway, even if I’m covered in the former when it happens. Maybe then, at least, I’ll be a good joke; he was such a shit he went out covered in it.

Ah hell, who knows, maybe medical science will finally reach a point that it can diagnose me. I doubt it. They say they don’t know what’s wrong with me. That all this breathless agony and withering muscle-tone’s in line with a prognosis and they’ve just gotta’ find the right one, treat it. I guess all they need’s a name. Something to call it, you know? Something hepatic, or encephalitic, or something with one of those -itis suffixes. I don’t know about them, but I call it life, and it’s a tragedy. A god damned tragedy.

Poetry-Thing Thursday: The Elder Three

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

One of three,
the elder race,
are you happy,
in this place?

Was it how,
you were born,
into this world,
broken and torn
as the men blew,
the war’s horn?

Or did you come
to love’s embrace,
to hide from us,
your eternal face?

Was it your choice,
to be scorned,
ripped from time,
by the hallow formed?

Did it call to you,
god-like, unarmed?
Tell me now,
my love be warmed.

Is it you alone,
that lit the fires,
of earth and men,
and hatred’s pyres?

Was it the other two,
of your station,
that then flew,
from Earth’s libations?

I listen, hear,
but with fear,
for a dying breath,
of my only dear.
Always to learn,
never to steer,
though I wish
with all my tears.

Gentle three,
the elder race,
what have you done,
to this place?

We’ve no more food,
left to brood,
with bloody death,
our only mood.

What compulsion,
of yours awaits?
Fulfillment from torture?
Our only fates?

One of three,
the elder race,
you’ve known nothing,
but your place.
So here is man,
in his own space,
leave us be,
return to grace.

Short Story: The Flash

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Flash

There was a flash like lightning. It lit the sky as daylight in pre-dawn. The momentary brightness gave way to a mushroom cloud of misery. As if meant to since it’s formation, the world changed in a blink. The nearest of its victims were vaporized. They were the fortunate ones. For what came next was a truth that mankind could never own up to; we are cowards, fools, children.

I was stationed near the far-edge of the blasts’ radius, just outside the critical radiation zone. I learned the truth of our nature first hand, saw its repercussions with my own, shielded eyes. Leader of my squad, and like them, clad in air-tight kevlar that stunk like week-old sweat even before our dirty flesh inhabited it. Had the enemy smelled our advance after the flash, the vaporization, the change of the world, they’d have surrendered for posterity’s sake– likely only as a bargaining chip to make as all shower, shave, have some R and R.

But war doesn’t allow for time-outs. That was something that had been drilled into the head of every recruit long before they’d ever joined the fight. Two decades of ground fighting saw the propaganda mill run like wild fire. Every standing wall left was blanketed with the colorful, subtle manipulations of a psychological war of a nation against its own. In a way, no one blamed them. It was the only route left to attempt to keep the peace. There was no longer order, only camps for the refugees, sick and dying. Meanwhile, cities that had stood the test of eons became the central zones of conflict. They were gone. Eradicated. All in a flash.

Our men on the front-lines hadn’t stood a chance, but neither did the enemy. That was the point. The particular phrases used? I remember them as if they’re etched into the blood on my hands: “Expendable assets,” “Acceptable Casualties,” “Cold Calculus.” For a layman they were confusing, but for a soldier they all meant the same thing; the men and women out there in the thick of it were to be sacrificed. The armchair generals had seen to that. They had watched from on-high, strategizing, and in a single thought, sealed the fates of those both friend and foe– sealed the truth of humanity’s cowardice.

Safely hidden away with the other officers, they made a “calculated decision.” Bullshit. They killed millions, raped the earth’s face to save themselves. That was all. My unit was sent in for “damage assessment and clean-up.” Euphemisms for confirming what we already knew, and murdering the poor bastards that hadn’t already been burnt to charred husks. Friend or foe, it didn’t matter, they were to be “neutralized.” I guess for some it would have been the final kindness we could grant.

When we made our advance through the furthest ruins, the buildings were largely intact. Or at least, as intact as decades-long bombing-runs, bullet-holes, and shrapnel could keep them. There were no windows, but you could sense where the refugees and soldiers had been. The former used scrap material to barricade windows and holed-walls. The latter left bodies, sandbags, spent ammunition and magazines in their wake.

The furthest outskirts of the blast were like wading through a physical history of the last twenty years. Bodies both decayed and fresh mingled with the skeletons of the long dead. The flies and other insects peppered the air as if a great plague had been unleashed. The buildings’ colors and brick were faded, pocked and divoted with destruction across their faces. Everywhere there were signs of scavengers– over turned bodies, out-turned pockets, emptied infantry packs. In this land, nothing was a sacred but survival. And now, because of us, even that had been hallowed.

When the clicks of the Geiger signaled the first reaches of the radiation, the sky was still dark. The land was silent. I doubt that even had anything survived in that place it would have been so bold as to make noise. My unit was silent but for the weary progress of our feet through ash and ruins. We had nothing to say, but our collective breaths of awe and disgust bled through our helmet comms. It was enough to tell that we were all present, accounted for, and mirrored one another’s sentiments.

It was almost dawn when we came upon a survivor. Though I hesitate to call her that. She was clearly dying; blind, dehydrated, irradiated, and burned all over. She heard us before we saw her, began to scream and wail for help. We found her under the rubble of a tin shack, its hot roof collapsed atop her. She begged for mercy, amnesty. At that we saw the tattered remains of her uniform. What hadn’t burnt into her skin was clear enough to denote that she was the enemy. Even so, we had our orders and none of us had the gall to tell her the truth.

I pulled the trigger myself. One round to the forehead. Her pain was over in a second. Mine had just begun. All of ours had. We had no idea what we’d find moving forward, but the scene of the woman became the exception.

What few people we did find were all dead. Most were civilians– refugees that had stubbornly refused to leave the war-zone they’d once called home. All middle-aged and more hardened than not. Their corpses were emaciated, soot-blackened, probably had been for longer than they’d known. It was saddening, but disappointing most of all. The groups here no longer knew why they were fighting. The militaries of both sides had long run out of volunteers, turned to draftees to do their dirty work. I doubt a single soul in that blast had any stake in the fight.

The Geiger was red-hot when we hit the first wave of vaporized buildings. They were mostly ash. Fires blazed across the horizons in every direction, had already begun to spread to the buildings behind us. The heat inside our suits increased ten-fold, threatened to bog us down with exhaustion and smother the life from our cowardly bodies.

There were no survivors this far in, only corpses. Each was more decrepit than the last. Charred skin turned to gooey mush nearer the blast’s epicenter. The bones of the dead obliterated inside from the force of the shock-wave. What few, mangled husks could be accurately identified as humans were little more than containers of meat for their cooked organs and powdered skeletons. The terrain had changed too. There were no longer even hints of buildings, just upturned and cracked earth. It formed hills and dirt dunes, all brown and black, composed of scorched elements that could no longer be identified as specific. Be they human, building, foliage, there was no way to tell.

It took nearly a full week to sweep the entire blast zone. We were fortunate enough in our suits’ designs that we could sleep comfortably in them, were allowed a fresh supply of oxygen from re-breathers in the helmets. I’ll never forget the last day though.

We’d just begun the last leg home when we came upon the corpse of a charred-black woman. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. More than likely she was one of the escort girls one side or the other brought to base for the pleasures of the men and women there. In her arms was the tattered remains of a swaddled infant. My unit stared at the scene, the greenest of us audibly sniffling over the comm.

We knew then what the rest of the world learned in that one, solitary act of inhumanity. We were cowards. Monsters. Everything our species had grown to become, all of its greatest endeavors, its most humbling mistakes, meant nothing. We were children who’d burned ourselves with fire. With little more thought than cold calculus, and the sacrifice of acceptable casualties, we’d given into darkness with a single, atomic flash.

The Pod: Part 7

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

7.

The Substation

It was very early in the morning, cold with a brisk wind that blew out of the North. We had deliberately stayed our hand, waiting for the opportune moment. In the week of planning and preparation that had followed our scouts return, there was no further advancement. Our scouts kept their eyes on the power station, and our patrols kept their guns ready, but thankfully, in vain. My Colleague and I put together a force of a dozen able-bodied men and women, finished the last of the weapons, and retrofitted capacitors in order to couple with the power station. The militia, comprised of men and women of all walks of life, said goodbye to their families and readied for the fight.

My Colleague and I, in our best attempts to rally morale, prepared a speech. We assembled whom we could to hear it, and all but the furthermost patrols were there. I began reading from notes written down, but soon abandoned them. They were filled with false sentiments, lies concocted to hide and ease all too present pains. These men and women did not need these things. They did not need the burden of false hope. They needed perspective.

“I won’t bother to sweeten things,” I said. “I’m not going to lie, or sell you false hope. It is not right, and it will not work. The truth is, Humanity is in shambles. Who do you place the blame upon? The inventor and his machine?” There was a sporadic nodding from the silent crowd. I countered, “He is an easy target, no doubt. So was Oppenheimer and his bomb.” This confused the crowd. “Neither of these men can attest to the actions carried out by the intent of those whose hands were placed at both switches. It is, however, at our feet. Every one of us, myself included, sought dreams of glory and triumph through violence– To prove ourselves in a challenge that we would never face, to bolster our egos.” I lost the crowd a little, with these remarks. No matter, I continued on. “It is partially the inventor’s blame, you say, for it was his machine that malfunctioned. This too, is a false sentiment. Perhaps the blame may lie solely at his feet, perhaps he has wished this plague upon the world. I have my doubts. As I look out, I see inside, that so do a great many of you. No, we all know the truth; it is our own fault. Each in our individual way, and collectively, our egos craved an ever-increasing boost.”

I paused to look out among the faces, many worse the wear for my words. It did not matter, morale or not, no man, woman, or child, would have stopped trying to survive. After a tense moment, I resumed my words. “So what is the solution, then? Give our ego the boost of a life time. Give Humanity’s collective ego a boost for the books. Let us look at this honestly, admit that we’ve made a mistake, and paid for it, and fix it.”

A slight applause began to creep from the crowd. It started slow, a few people here and there, before building to a courteous clamor. It erupted suddenly into a full-on roar, the group finally feeling the impact of my words.

“Many have given their lives to fix it, and we have all made payment for it. We live in fear, cowering, remorseful, wallowing in our own pity. This is not the time to make fools of ourselves! Let us win the day! Let us earn that one final boost, erase our mistake from the page, and continue on. Let us eradicate these damned swarms! Are we going to let these tiny bastards push us around?”

A chorus of “No!” gripped the bolstered crowd.

“Or bring us down?”

“No!”

“Or scare us into living like caged animals?”

“No!”

“Then get your asses ready, and let’s take this fight to them!”

A thunderous applause erupted. My Colleague raised a fist, thrusting it into the air with defiance. The others joined in, chanting a rhythmic “No!” The dozen militia members charged off for the waiting vehicles, and headed for the station. My own fervor got the better of me; I too charged off, my colleague fast behind me. We started the trucks and tore off through the neighborhoods, onto the rural roads. Sprinted for the main road in front of the substation, setting up a defensive line.

My colleague and I gave the militia their orders; distract the masses to buy us time to plant our explosives. They inched nearer the substation, and my colleague and I set off for a path ’round the back. We made our way to a point along the side, and infiltrated through a tree-line there. The first shots came from the militia. We hastily cut our way through the fence surrounding the station, climbed through for the smallest transformers, grouped together in one section of the area. The shots grew louder, more numerous as the seconds passed. There was no time to fear what might be happening. We planted the explosives on the first transformers, moved to the mid-sized ones.

The plan was to overload the largest grouping by taking out the conduits that would dampen their charge. This required all of the smallest, and several of the mid-sized transformers to be destroyed.

We rigged the last charges, and made our retreat. Back on the road, we were taken by a terrifying sight. It froze us mid-stride, our minds unbelieving of our eyes. A massive swarm, continually transformed its shape as it threw cloud-like fists upon the militia. Bodies lay slumped over trucks, some thrown back on the road in puddles of blood. We watched on, aghast. The swarm threw a cloud at one man on a truck. He flew backward, to the ground. It advanced on him with a second cloud. He clambered to regain his footing. In his confusion he missed his chance to dodge. The impact slammed the man’s body into the road, threw small chunks of asphalt into the air. His corpse had been pulverized. He was done for, but a few others remained. We had to act.

My Colleague and I snapped from our trances, hurried to our truck and signaled a retreat. I jumped on the gun to engage the mass. It turned its sights from the fleeing militia to us. I fired inexhaustibly. The truck accelerated, flew forward at an alarming rate. My shots became erratic, missing by miles. The truck burst through the station’s high, front gate throwing me forward.

The swarm gave chase, toward the center of the clearing between the transformers. The truck stopped, my colleague climbed up into the back. The swarm descended rapidly.

“It is good to have known you, my friend,” He said. He smiled a wicked smile, as only a man crazed by the exhilaration of sacrifice could.

“You as well,” I said with a slight bow of my head.

I let out a battle cry, and fired the weapon. My shots hit the swarm that encompassed my vision, but dislodged little of its individual flecks. My friend lifted the detonator from his pocket, flicked a switch. We flung ourselves to our bellies in the bed of the truck. Fireballs erupted on either side of us, searing the area. The swarm gave pause.

Then, with a sound of building electricity, the final transformers overloaded. The swarm, confused by the explosions, stood motionless as the largest transformers blasted apart. A tidal wave of electricity accompanied fireballs and debris that engulfed the area. The gun’s batteries in the bed exploded. Lead-acid sprayed our clothes, burned us, but we dared rise until the swarm had collapsed.

And collapse it did! The electrical wave burst forth, and the swarm surged. It burst into flames like a mortar around us. Electrical arcs discharged into the truck, nearby by metallic surfaces, and melted the gun’s barrel above. The scent of burning rubber mixed with a thousand acrid fumes that spewed skyward in plumes of smoke.

Then, with a final, crackling of electricity, that beautiful rain of embers began once more.

My Colleague and I, pained from the burning acid and choked by the flames, rose to our knees. We watched the swarm burn and fall to dust on the ground. We laughed, cheered with giddy delight, hugged in a celebratory manner as two men who’ve conquered such a beast against our odds might. The day had been won, Humanity the victor.

Epilogue

In the days and weeks that followed the defeat of the massive swarm, we were able to reclaim much of the city and begin rebuilding what had been lost. Though the lives of many were irreplaceable, few felt it a price they couldn’t live with. It was not a foolish sentiment in the least. For either because of many combined factors, or just that fateful speech before the fight, many saw the true villain behind the swarms: It wasn’t the machines that had malfunctioned, and it wasn’t a man who’d built them poorly, it was ourselves. Each and every one of us had contributed to the near-fatal destruction wrought upon our species and our civilization. In each our own way, we learned the dreadful power of our own egos. In this knowledge, a new-found kindness and concern for one another emerged. No person went hungry, homeless, nor without aid in our new city.

Whether or not there are swarms left beyond our little crook in the world, I cannot yet say. No one has since ventured too far into the outskirts. There is no mass-communication left– the swarms have seen to that. As well, we have no time to. When reconstruction is over, we will move toward neighboring cities in search of survivors, and to provide aide and weaponry if need be.

Few things are certain of the human condition, save these points: Firstly, there is triumph in the human spirit that can be found when others suffer unduly. And that beneath all of our desires for greatness, all of our wants to be best, strongest; there is an aching desire to band together as one, and see that boost of pride passed on– At least, in some ways. For Humanity is both its own worst enemy and its greatest ally, and its dreams both beautiful and nightmarish.