Back to original characters (I could really call this two separate chapters if I wanted to, but why?)
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The first thing he realized as he woke up was that he was in a hospital bed. The second was that Betty was in the seat next to him, and she was looking at him, her expression very serious.
"Corey. How are you?"
"Betty. I guess I feel pretty much okay. What...?" She looked like she had something important to say, so he stopped.
"I'm sorry to spring this on you right now, but he's in critical condition."
"He...? The President?"
She nodded. "He was complaining of chest pain right after the energy wave, remember? Well later he got a headache, too. Then he passed out, an hour or two after you did. He's in a coma now."
"Holy crap. What was it?"
"They're still trying to figure it out, but based on some symptoms they're seeing in other patients it doesn't look good."
"Like what?"
She looked at him intently, but didn't say anything. After a few seconds he realized she was on the verge of tears.
"What? How bad?"
"You." She wiped away the tears and spoke the syllable more clearly. "You."
"What about me?" Fear coursed throughout his body, making him tingle all over. He hadn't done anything to the President, hadn't passed anything along to him?
"Look at yourself." She held out her hand. In it was a little make-up mirror.
He took the mirror with unsteady hands. He held it up, and then wished he hadn't. His first thought was of a diagram of a lung blackened by lung cancer. Then he thought of leprosy, of old footage of lepers far gone into their disease. His face and neck were covered in ugly black splotches outlined in red. He dropped the mirror. The clatter it made on the ground was unsatisfying, nothing like it should have sounded at the moment: it should have been ear-shattering, heart-wrenching, horrible to listen to. That was how he felt.
"You seem to be the only one with the skin condition, but many others are having heart problems and headaches, and they're saying it's all related. They're starting to think it's an epidemic, real biological weapons."
He burst into tears. For the first time since he had signed with the McKenna 2008 campaign he thought of himself before the President. Who cared if Mr. President was having heart problems? HE was DYING. He looked like something out of a horror film. He was coming apart. It was fine with him if he had taken President McKenna down with him; at least he wouldn't be the only who had to suffer that way.
"I'm sorry, Core."
His inclination was to scream at her, to make it painfully obvious to her that she had no idea what it was like to look in a mirror and see something like that, but something stopped him. She was sitting right there in front of him, he realized, so close to him. Most likely she WOULD find out what it was like.
"Why are you here? You'll be infected."
"It's too late. I touched you before you hit the ground yesterday. I was there when the red spots started to show up, and when they turned black. It's far too late."
"Betty?"
She reached down and touched his face lightly. "But at least it doesn't hurt, right? You said it didn't hurt?"
It didn't, not really. It tingled. It tingled like he had already lost all of the nerve endings. And that only terrified him more. "I don't want to die, Betty."
"Me either." Her fingers started to move as if she were going to stroke his face, but then she jerked them back suddenly. "Oh God, sorry. I'm so sorry."
He didn't even want to know what had happened, what her touch had done to his already destroyed face.
He shifted his body slightly, trying to get comfortable.
"Don't do that. Please don't do that."
"What?"
"Shift. Your hair..." She reached over behind his head, and then brought her hand back into his field of vision. In it was a tuft of hair. His dead hair. His hair was coming out so easily that the slightest bit of friction against the pillow was making it come out in tufts.
"Leave please."
"Core?"
"Please. I don't want you to see me like this. I don't want you to remember me like this." Images of his mother flashed before his eyes. She had been a healthy, strong woman for a good 75 years before the cancer got to her. By the time she died she was an empty shell of a person, and the truly tragic thing was that he would always remember her like that, not as she had been all her life.
"You shouldn't be alone, not at a time like this."
"You're wrong. I need to be." There was silence for several seconds, and though Corey wasn't looking at her he guessed that Betty was crying. "What about the President?"
When she spoke it was obvious that she was indeed crying. "There's nothing we can do for him now. I'll know as soon as he's out of the coma."
"What about your job? What about Friedman? He's president now; we'll be more important to him than we've been to President McKenna."
She sobbed. "Friedman is already dead; heart attack the moment the wave came through. Berrell is acting president."
"Just strengthens my case."
"You're right," she said through a steady flow of sobs, "He needs us. I...I should go."
"Yes."
She stood up and turned away from him, the kind of motion that told him she couldn't stand to look at him anymore. It hurt even though he had just finished saying that he didn't want her to see him like that, remember him like that. Seeing that broke some little part inside of him that had managed to stay together even after he discovered what had happened to him. He sobbed.
Hearing him sob, she stopped but didn't turn around. "Goodbye." She left the room without even a fleeting backward glance.
Now he was alone, completely alone. Her farewell echoed in his head. It was too final, far too final. She knew she would never see him again. She knew that he would be dead before it would be possible for him to see her again. He would be alone for the rest of his life, eternally alone.
He didn't know what to do with himself anymore. Part of him wanted to scream, to curse at Betty and President McKenna and Acting President Berrell and the entire human race and nature and God himself. Part of him wanted to fall asleep, to pretend that nothing had ever happened, to hope that when he woke up he would find out it had been nothing but a nightmare. And part of him wanted to die, to get it over with and stop himself from wasting away down to a little nothing before he died anyway.
He sat up, suddenly filled with determination. It hurt to sit up, and he could feel hair coming out, falling down his back and to the bed, but still he did it. He looked around. He had to find something to write with. He noticed the little button next to his bed, the one that would call a nurse. But he didn't want a nurse. He didn't want to talk to her, didn't want her to see him. He looked for a pen. There was one, on the counter. It was out of reach, but if he were to get off the bed he would be able to reach it. He swiveled sideways on the bed and swung his legs around to the edge. As he did he could have sworn he could feel things falling away from his skin. After pausing to shake himself off he lowered one leg slowly to the floor. He put some weight on it, then a little more. It was weak, and his ankle was very sore, but he could put enough weight on it. He stretched out, toward the pen, and because of the foot on the ground he could reach it. He tried to grasp it but his hand didn't curl tightly enough the first time. He tried again, and this time it curled a little tighter, tight enough that he could pick it up. He jerked it quickly back, fearing that he would drop it in midair. He did, but its momentum took it to the edge of the bed, where he picked it up in his other hand. He sighed and brought his leg back up onto the bed, then swiveled his body back into position. Finally he was ready. He pressed the material of his gown to his chest with the pen tip and wrote, in large, upside-down letters, "DNR." At least it was something, some kind of victory.
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When it happened Damian had been walking around downtown instead of being in school. He had actually just gotten his first glimpse of City Hall and Will Penn when the energy wave had passed over him. He had been curious about it at first, he remembered, but he had had more important things on his mind and he had quickly forgotten about it.
He had finally told his parents, finally come out of the closet. That's why he was downtown instead of at school; he couldn't face the reactions of the other students after the drama at home. Besides, his brother had undoubtedly spread it all over the school by then and they were probably all out looking for him, ready to beat the crap out of him.
He remembered he was feeling particular hatred toward his parents and his brother when he saw the first sign that everything wasn't normal. It was a woman. She was screaming hysterically. It wasn't English - he hadn't understood her words - but he knew what she was saying. Someone was dead or damn near. That's how hysterical she sounded.
He had watched her for a little while before feeling guilty and turning away. It had made him feel a little better, he remembered, to know that he wasn't the only one having a really crappy day.
But it wasn't over by a long shot. He was walking away when he heard the noise; he had already almost forgotten about the hysterical woman. He heard a crash, a small explosion of brick and glass. He whipped his head around in time to see that a wall had been knocked out of the store the woman had come running out of. It had been knocked out from inside; there was a ton of brick and glass fragments falling all over the sidewalk and street. Then the man appeared. He came out right over the pile of rubble. He was holding his head with both hands and shaking, as if he had the mother of all headaches. He lurched sideways. He was about to crash into a section of the store wall that was still standing, so he brought one hand forward to stop himself. Where his hand hit the wall the brick shattered inward and he tripped and fell back into the store.
"Shit!" yelled Damian. He had never seen anything like it.
Even that wasn't the end of it. There had been a car driving by when the man had appeared, and now it stopped and the driver got out. It was a young woman. She ran over to the store and the scene of the confusion with the man, but she didn't even make it over the pile of rubble. She was picking her way through it when there was another little explosion and the woman disappeared. Damian shook his head and looked again, but she still wasn't there. He glanced over and saw that her car was still there, the driver's side door still half-open. He looked back to the store with its wrecked outer wall. The man came back into view, and this time he had a big gash on his forehead. It was probably from his fall. Either that or the most recent explosion. In any case he was lurching around still, and Damian decided it was about time to leave. He didn't know what in the hell was going on, but he didn't really want to find out. He might have gone over to try to help the guy, but after the woman disappeared...
He was almost out of sight of the ruined store when he first noticed it. It was the smell, a distinct smell of burning. It was strong, also, too strong to have drifted over from the store. He looked all around but didn't see any smoke. After a few more seconds he decided that he was wrong, that he was just smelling someone's attempts at barbeque or something.
As he continued to walk it became more distinct. It wasn't barbeque. It was cloth. Someone's clothes were on fire. He took another step or two, then it became extremely obvious where the smell was coming from: it was his clothes that were on fire, his pants.
He stopped, dropped, and rolled just like he was taught to do, but it didn't go out. It got worse, in fact, and started to smoke a little. He rolled some more, but it still didn't go out.
Now he was nervous, and didn't make him feel better when his shirtsleeves caught on fire: first the left, then the right. He beat them frantically against the ground, and the right one did go out for a second, but then it went right on burning.
He stopped. He stood up. He gave himself one big shake. There was obviously something not right. He wasn't in pain. He didn't feel the heat. Sure, it looked like his clothes were on fire and it smelled like his clothes were on fire, but it had to have been a trick. He wasn't really on fire. It was a hallucination, or something.
He kept walking, trying to ignore the fact that it really did look and smell like he was on fire. He told himself he was fine; he wasn't really on fire. If it did start to feel hot and it did start to hurt then he would worry, but until then there was no problem.
Unfortunately, if it was a hallucination other people suffered from it also. People were definitely staring at him. One girl was pointing at him. He pretended he didn't see her.
His cell phone rang. It took two rings before he figured out what the noise was. Feeling like something out of a painting by Dali he reached around, his arm still burning, and unzipped the outer pocket of his backpack and pulled out the phone.
"Hello?"
It was his father. "Oh thank God, Damian. Your mother isn't picking up and neither is your brother." He sounded more frantic than Damian could remember ever hearing him before.
He didn't know what to think. He was still too confused by the man who had destroyed the shop, the disappearing woman, and his own burning clothes. He couldn't make sense out of what his father was saying. And, since he was already mad at his dad, this confusion didn't make him feel like being very friendly.
"Damian?"
"Yeah?"
"Where is your brother? Go find him right now. I want to know he's safe."
It occurred to Damian that his father thought he was at school. On the other hand, was it really that hard to believe that he wouldn't go to school, after what his asshole parents had told him the night before? Especially his dad. "I'm not at school right now, Dad. And I don't really give much of a crap if Ty is safe."
"Damian!" He paused. "Please, please just forget about last night. This is..."
"Forget about last night? Dad!"
"Damn it, Damian, listen to me. We've been attacked, got it? We've been attacked by terrorists."
He heard it and he understood all of the words, but he didn't get it. "What are you..."
"Shut up! We've been attacked and you need to find out if Ty and your mother are alright!"
"I just told you: I'm not at school."
"Then get to school!" He was screaming by this point.
Damian was shocked. None of it made any sense.
"Damian!"
"Fine!" he screamed back. "Fine, I'm going!" He took the phone away from his ear and jammed the End button.
Even more people were staring at him now. He felt like screaming at all of them to leave him alone. Instead he reached around and put the phone back into his backpack pocket. He sighed and turned back toward school. There wouldn't be a bus for a little while, so it would probably take him a good twenty or thirty minutes to get back to school. And that was if they let him on the bus.
A minute or two later he found himself back at the store; the front wall was still demolished, the sidewalk was still covered in rubble, and the woman was still missing. Except that now her car was also, he realized. He wondered whether she did reappear or whether some crook took advantage of the door being open and stole it.
It was a minute or two after that before someone finally said something to him. It was a guy not much older than him. He started by swearing loudly, which got Damian's attention.
Then he said, "You're on fire, dude!"
Damian wondered whether he should explain to the guy that he already knew. He figured it wasn't worth it.
"Dude, your backpack's burning!"
That time he did stop and pay attention. He took off his backpack. It was in open flame, and the top had already been burned through. He threw it on the ground and opened it up, only to find that all the paper inside was burning. He grabbed as many notebooks and textbooks and as he could fit his hand around and pulled them out. That only put them in contact with his burning shirt, though, and they started to burn worse. The top notebook turned into a pile of ash before his eyes.
"Here!" said someone. He looked up and found a man holding a water bottle toward him.
"Thanks!" he said and opened his hands to catch it. The man threw it to him and he caught it, opened it up, and poured water over the burning pile. It didn't help much. Now everything was either burnt or wet, and either way he couldn't read it. And he had emptied it out, so he had nothing to use on his backpack.
"What about you, your clothes?" asked the man who had given him the water.
"Don't worry about it." What else was he supposed to say? He still didn't feel the heat from the flames.
It wasn't long before his old piece-of-crap backpack was too far gone to worry about. So much for his school stuff. He pulled out the cell phone, the CD player, and the CD case, all of which were starting to melt a little from the flames. He put the cell into his pocket and kept walking in the general direction of his school.
A block or two later he realized that the flames had traveled all the way up his legs to his crotch. He still didn't feel them but that was just a little too creepy, so he stopped and beat them back. It worked well enough, for once, but he still didn't feel much better; he couldn't help but notice that the flames had consumed the material of his pants to the knee on the right side and to halfway up the shin on the left side. His sleeves were shorter than before, too.
He decided he would be better off running. Hopefully that way he would be to the school before all of his clothes were burned away. And there was the wind he was creating as he ran; that might help slow down the flames a little.
After a few seconds he had been wrong; the wind made the flames worse, not better. Even so it would be better for him to get to school faster.
He was almost to his bus stop when his phone rang again. It was loud; he had the ringer on high so he could hear it from his backpack. He had it out before the tune of the ringer had gone through once. He slowed to a walk as he answered it.
"Hello?"
"Damian, where are you?" It was his dad again. He was still screaming.
"I'm on my way. I'm having some trouble, okay?"
"Just...just hurry." He wasn't screaming anymore, which was nice. Unfortunately, he also sounded depressed.
"Dad?"
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. It was broken not by screams or by words at all. It was broken by sobs.
"Dad?"
"Your mom's on the way to the hospital. She...she's not going to make it."
Damian stopped dead. "What?"
"She...she wasn't breathing when I got home. I called the ambulance..."
"Dad?"
"She was blue. It's too late."
His mom was dead? That couldn't be right. His mom was fine. She had been crying the night before, sure, but there was nothing physically wrong with her. And of course he hadn't seen her this morning, but he'd heard her. She had been in the kitchen. If he had wanted to he could have gone down and gotten her to make breakfast for him like she did for Ty. He had used the side door instead so he didn't have to face her, but he could have seen her. His dad had to have been wrong.
"Damian, don't come home."
"Huh?"
"Don't come home. Just go to your brother. Make...make sure he's okay, and just stay there. You hear me?"
"Yeah, I hear you. But look...Mom was just in the kitchen..."
"Damian, don't come home." He left out a couple of sobs. "Bye." The phone line went silent.
Now he was even more confused than before. Why would his dad tell him not to come home? Why would he have said Mom wasn't going to make it?
Most of a block ahead of him the bus was just pulling in at the stop. That would be his bus. He ran for it and made it just in time.
"What the hell?" said the bus driver. "Kid, you're on fire!"
"And my mom just died, too. What about it?" It had gotten to be too much. Just too much.
The bus driver didn't close the door, but Damian wasn't about to go anywhere. He had to get to school, to see his brother. His brother would have some idea what was going on. He would be able to explain the joke, how he made it so that Damian's clothes caught on fire, why he told Dad to tell him Mom had died and that he wasn't allowed to come home.
"Go!" he yelled. It was startling enough that the bus driver closed the doors behind him. Damian walked up the steps and right past the driver without paying. People stared at him as he started down the aisle.
The bus was moving now. It wouldn't be long now before he got to school.
He rode the whole way standing up. Part of it was that he didn't want to burn the seats, but he also wanted to be able to get off as quickly as possible. It also allowed him to pace, which made him feel a little less overwhelmed, even if it didn't really help anything.
The time the bus stopped his clothes were in burned tatters. At least they hadn't fallen off yet, though.
When he finally made it to school he got a very bad feeling. It was too quiet. He went inside and the sounds of him gasping for breath echoed off the tile walls; he had run the whole way and had tired himself out, but his breathing still wasn't THAT much louder than usual.
All of the classrooms had something over the little glass windows, and it wasn't long before he figured out what was happening: it was an intruder/terrorism drill. The school had a special alarm in case some student came to school with a gun or there was a terrorist attack or something, where everybody sat still in the rooms and was quiet and you turned off the lights, locked the doors, and covered the windows in the doors.
It took him another couple of rooms before he had processed the information, but when he did he stopped. What if it wasn't a drill? What if there really was a terrorist attack? That's what his dad had said. He stared at the nearest door with its cheerful green window covering. Terrorists had attacked?
It didn't matter, he decided, or at least he had to find his brother anyway. He looked around. Now that he thought about it, he realized he didn't know which class his brother had. He did sort of know Ty's schedule, but if he had known where all the classes were he still wouldn't have known which one he was in now; he didn't know what period it was. But he couldn't just stand there and do nothing. He ran over to the library, remembering that it had a nice big clock in it and thinking it might be open still. It wasn't. Then he remembered the sundial in the quad. It wasn't really a clock, but at least it had the numbers printed right on the ground. He ran out to the quad. There wasn't a whole lot of sun, but there was enough to make a shadow. It was about 10:20. That would make it just the beginning of third period. Still, he didn't see any groups of students winding their way to their classes. They would still all have been in their second period classes still, unless the alarm had gone off so long ago that they were still in their first period classes. But Ty didn't have a first period class, so he wouldn't have been allowed into class at all if the alarm had already gone off. So second period it was. Ty's second period was math, and his teacher was Mrs. Piani. He knew where her room was and he went there.
Once he got there he found he didn't know what to do. He was still on fire, now more than ever, so he had to hurry and find a way to make it in to his brother. He didn't know how to go about doing that, so he figured he would start with the obvious approach: he knocked on the door.
"Ty!" he yelled through the door, "It's Damian. Open up." He tried the door, but it was locked like he thought it would be. He waited, but so no answer came so he tried again.
The door opened and Ty grabbed him and dragged him into the room. "You stupid...What the hell?" He was looking at the flames burning through Damian's shirt and pants.
"You tell me."
"What? Put it out!" He threw Damian to the floor of the classroom and tried to put out the flames.
"It's...hey! It's no use!" He said, trying to defend himself.
"What do you mean? Put it out!"
"It's not burning me!"
Ty kept trying to put out the flames.
"I said it's not burning me!"
Finally Ty backed off. His hands were red, burned.
Damian was confused. He got to his feet. "What?"
"That's my line. What the hell is going on?"
"It burned you?"
"No, it sang to me!"
Damian didn't know what to say. He had seen it burn his clothes, and he had seen it burn the paper in his backpack, but he didn't guess that it would actually burn people.
"Tell me what the hell is going on!" demanded Ty. Everyone in the classroom was staring.
"We have to go to the hospital."
Ty was getting mad now. He looked like he was going to punch Damian.
"Dad called and said he went home and Mom wasn't breathing and they took her to the hospital and he said not to come back and he didn't know why you weren't answering your phone and..."
"Damian, shut up!"
"We have to go."
"You aren't allowed to leave," said Mrs. Piani.
"We have to go!" He was talking directly to Ty, ignoring the old math teacher.
"We don't know what's happening out there," said Mrs. Piani. She was also talking to Ty.
Ty turned back to Damian. "She's right. There were all these noises, these bangs. People were screaming. Who knows what the hell is happening out there."
"I just came from there! There's nothing!" He grabbed Ty's arm.
"Shit!" He jerked his arm away from Damian. "What the hell was that?" There was now a big red burn where Damian had touched his brother. He stared at his brother, and everyone else stared at him.
"Well I'm going!" He left without looking back. He had gone 60 or 70 feet when the door opened and Ty came out.
"Hey! Wait!"
He didn't wait, but Ty caught up with him anyway.
"Mom wasn't breathing?"
"I don't know." Or he pretended he didn't, anyway. It was easier that way.
When they got to the car Ty unlocked the doors then looked at Damian before getting in. "You're going to burn the seat."
"Just drive!" He got in.
"At least lean forward or something."
Damian did. Ty drove.
When they got to the hospital there was nowhere to park. Ty ditched the car illegally at the end of a row. They ran inside, where they found the waiting room overrun with people. Even so, Damian attracted the attention of a nurse.
After some negotiation they convinced her Damian didn't need to be put out, and that they needed to see their mom. The problem was that there wasn't any record of her entering the hospital.
"There's no Valerie Sayers?"
"No, sorry." She was looking over the list of patients. "There's a Martin Sayers." She shrugged.
"What?" demanded Ty.
"You know him?"
"He's our dad!"
"He was admitted with the symptoms of radiation poisoning."
"Where is he?" That definitely didn't sound good.
"Room 418, but he..." They were already leaving. "Hey, wait!"
Damian slowed down enough to listen to what she had to say.
"Are you sure you're okay?"
He waved her off. "Fine!" He ran and caught up with Ty.
When they found him Damian, for one, almost wished they hadn't. He was unconscious. His skin had ugly red blotches over it. His hair was thinner. His whole body was thinner. He looked like a person does after fighting off a disease for a long time, like a year or more.
"What are you doing here?" asked someone in scrubs, probably a doctor.
"That's our dad!"
"He's in no condition to be receiving visitors. Please leave."
"He's our dad!" Ty was yelling at this point. Apparently he was loud enough to wake up Dad. He stirred, blinked his eyes, and looked at them.
"Ty? Damian?" His voice was weak, far too weak.
"Dad!"
"Do you realize you're on fire?" asked the doctor of Damian.
"I told you not to come home. I didn't want you to see me."
"Dad..."
"Where is Mom?" asked Damian.
Instead of answering he closed his eyes and swallowed. He looked like he was in terrible pain.
"Where is she?" pressed Ty.
"She's already gone," Damian answered. He had known even before he had asked, even before they had driven to the hospital, back when Dad had told him. He just hadn't believed it. Not until now.
"You have to leave," repeated the doctor. "This man has received a severe dose of radiation. He isn't safe to be around. He's going to be moved in just a moment."
"Radiation. Why? How?" Ty looked back and forth from the doctor to his dad as he spoke, inviting either man to answer his questions.
Finally the doctor had gotten tired of waiting. He grabbed Ty by the arm and pulled him out of the room. He was less willing to grab onto Damian.
"You need to go, Damian," said his dad. "I'm just glad you boys are alright. I'm sorry if I ever hurt you." He closed his eyes again.
"Dad?" He walked right up to his bedside. "Dad?" He felt tears coming to his eyes. He fought them back. "Dad?"
"Come on!" That was Ty this time, from outside the room.
Slowly Damian stepped away from his dad's bed. He paused briefly, turned, and walked out.
Back in the waiting room, Damian and Ty weren't very talkative.
"What happened to Mom?" asked Ty, breaking a silence of over a minute.
"When Dad called me he said she wasn't breathing when he found her." He shrugged. "Choked, maybe."
They settled into silence again. Damian, for his part, was thinking about the night before. His dad had all but kicked him out then. And now he was dying. But he had apologized. Damian hadn't. As he realized that he felt a sharp twinge of guilt; he hadn't returned the apology when his dad had apologized to him. Yes his dad had started it, and yes it wouldn't have been nearly as bad if his dad hadn't gotten mad and started insulting him, but Damian certainly hadn't been a gentleman back. And now his dad was dying and he had missed his chance to apologize.
His mom wasn't any better. She hadn't been angry the way his dad had been, but she had cried. Her reaction was almost worse. And he hadn't even had a chance to see her before she died. He remembered back to that morning, an eternally long time past, to when he was thinking about how much he hated his parents and Ty. Had anything not changed since then?
"Damian?"
"Yeah?"
"Your pants."
His pants had finally burned through. If he were to stand up now they would fall away completely. He had to wonder whether God just had to add that little insult on top of taking away his mother and father. "Now what?"
"We need to find a way to put out that flame, then we can go home and get more clothes."
"Yeah." He hadn't been able to think of a way to put it out before, and at the moment he wasn't feeling very creative.
"I think you have to put it out."
"Why?"
"It's coming from inside of you."
It was a simple sentence, but it was incomprehensible to Damian. The fire was coming from inside of him? How could fire have been coming from inside of him? Why wouldn't he had have burned from the inside out already? Did Ty even know what he was saying?
"I guess you'll just be on fire until you figure out how to put it out."
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The first thing he realized as he woke up was that he was in a hospital bed. The second was that Betty was in the seat next to him, and she was looking at him, her expression very serious.
"Corey. How are you?"
"Betty. I guess I feel pretty much okay. What...?" She looked like she had something important to say, so he stopped.
"I'm sorry to spring this on you right now, but he's in critical condition."
"He...? The President?"
She nodded. "He was complaining of chest pain right after the energy wave, remember? Well later he got a headache, too. Then he passed out, an hour or two after you did. He's in a coma now."
"Holy crap. What was it?"
"They're still trying to figure it out, but based on some symptoms they're seeing in other patients it doesn't look good."
"Like what?"
She looked at him intently, but didn't say anything. After a few seconds he realized she was on the verge of tears.
"What? How bad?"
"You." She wiped away the tears and spoke the syllable more clearly. "You."
"What about me?" Fear coursed throughout his body, making him tingle all over. He hadn't done anything to the President, hadn't passed anything along to him?
"Look at yourself." She held out her hand. In it was a little make-up mirror.
He took the mirror with unsteady hands. He held it up, and then wished he hadn't. His first thought was of a diagram of a lung blackened by lung cancer. Then he thought of leprosy, of old footage of lepers far gone into their disease. His face and neck were covered in ugly black splotches outlined in red. He dropped the mirror. The clatter it made on the ground was unsatisfying, nothing like it should have sounded at the moment: it should have been ear-shattering, heart-wrenching, horrible to listen to. That was how he felt.
"You seem to be the only one with the skin condition, but many others are having heart problems and headaches, and they're saying it's all related. They're starting to think it's an epidemic, real biological weapons."
He burst into tears. For the first time since he had signed with the McKenna 2008 campaign he thought of himself before the President. Who cared if Mr. President was having heart problems? HE was DYING. He looked like something out of a horror film. He was coming apart. It was fine with him if he had taken President McKenna down with him; at least he wouldn't be the only who had to suffer that way.
"I'm sorry, Core."
His inclination was to scream at her, to make it painfully obvious to her that she had no idea what it was like to look in a mirror and see something like that, but something stopped him. She was sitting right there in front of him, he realized, so close to him. Most likely she WOULD find out what it was like.
"Why are you here? You'll be infected."
"It's too late. I touched you before you hit the ground yesterday. I was there when the red spots started to show up, and when they turned black. It's far too late."
"Betty?"
She reached down and touched his face lightly. "But at least it doesn't hurt, right? You said it didn't hurt?"
It didn't, not really. It tingled. It tingled like he had already lost all of the nerve endings. And that only terrified him more. "I don't want to die, Betty."
"Me either." Her fingers started to move as if she were going to stroke his face, but then she jerked them back suddenly. "Oh God, sorry. I'm so sorry."
He didn't even want to know what had happened, what her touch had done to his already destroyed face.
He shifted his body slightly, trying to get comfortable.
"Don't do that. Please don't do that."
"What?"
"Shift. Your hair..." She reached over behind his head, and then brought her hand back into his field of vision. In it was a tuft of hair. His dead hair. His hair was coming out so easily that the slightest bit of friction against the pillow was making it come out in tufts.
"Leave please."
"Core?"
"Please. I don't want you to see me like this. I don't want you to remember me like this." Images of his mother flashed before his eyes. She had been a healthy, strong woman for a good 75 years before the cancer got to her. By the time she died she was an empty shell of a person, and the truly tragic thing was that he would always remember her like that, not as she had been all her life.
"You shouldn't be alone, not at a time like this."
"You're wrong. I need to be." There was silence for several seconds, and though Corey wasn't looking at her he guessed that Betty was crying. "What about the President?"
When she spoke it was obvious that she was indeed crying. "There's nothing we can do for him now. I'll know as soon as he's out of the coma."
"What about your job? What about Friedman? He's president now; we'll be more important to him than we've been to President McKenna."
She sobbed. "Friedman is already dead; heart attack the moment the wave came through. Berrell is acting president."
"Just strengthens my case."
"You're right," she said through a steady flow of sobs, "He needs us. I...I should go."
"Yes."
She stood up and turned away from him, the kind of motion that told him she couldn't stand to look at him anymore. It hurt even though he had just finished saying that he didn't want her to see him like that, remember him like that. Seeing that broke some little part inside of him that had managed to stay together even after he discovered what had happened to him. He sobbed.
Hearing him sob, she stopped but didn't turn around. "Goodbye." She left the room without even a fleeting backward glance.
Now he was alone, completely alone. Her farewell echoed in his head. It was too final, far too final. She knew she would never see him again. She knew that he would be dead before it would be possible for him to see her again. He would be alone for the rest of his life, eternally alone.
He didn't know what to do with himself anymore. Part of him wanted to scream, to curse at Betty and President McKenna and Acting President Berrell and the entire human race and nature and God himself. Part of him wanted to fall asleep, to pretend that nothing had ever happened, to hope that when he woke up he would find out it had been nothing but a nightmare. And part of him wanted to die, to get it over with and stop himself from wasting away down to a little nothing before he died anyway.
He sat up, suddenly filled with determination. It hurt to sit up, and he could feel hair coming out, falling down his back and to the bed, but still he did it. He looked around. He had to find something to write with. He noticed the little button next to his bed, the one that would call a nurse. But he didn't want a nurse. He didn't want to talk to her, didn't want her to see him. He looked for a pen. There was one, on the counter. It was out of reach, but if he were to get off the bed he would be able to reach it. He swiveled sideways on the bed and swung his legs around to the edge. As he did he could have sworn he could feel things falling away from his skin. After pausing to shake himself off he lowered one leg slowly to the floor. He put some weight on it, then a little more. It was weak, and his ankle was very sore, but he could put enough weight on it. He stretched out, toward the pen, and because of the foot on the ground he could reach it. He tried to grasp it but his hand didn't curl tightly enough the first time. He tried again, and this time it curled a little tighter, tight enough that he could pick it up. He jerked it quickly back, fearing that he would drop it in midair. He did, but its momentum took it to the edge of the bed, where he picked it up in his other hand. He sighed and brought his leg back up onto the bed, then swiveled his body back into position. Finally he was ready. He pressed the material of his gown to his chest with the pen tip and wrote, in large, upside-down letters, "DNR." At least it was something, some kind of victory.
................................................
When it happened Damian had been walking around downtown instead of being in school. He had actually just gotten his first glimpse of City Hall and Will Penn when the energy wave had passed over him. He had been curious about it at first, he remembered, but he had had more important things on his mind and he had quickly forgotten about it.
He had finally told his parents, finally come out of the closet. That's why he was downtown instead of at school; he couldn't face the reactions of the other students after the drama at home. Besides, his brother had undoubtedly spread it all over the school by then and they were probably all out looking for him, ready to beat the crap out of him.
He remembered he was feeling particular hatred toward his parents and his brother when he saw the first sign that everything wasn't normal. It was a woman. She was screaming hysterically. It wasn't English - he hadn't understood her words - but he knew what she was saying. Someone was dead or damn near. That's how hysterical she sounded.
He had watched her for a little while before feeling guilty and turning away. It had made him feel a little better, he remembered, to know that he wasn't the only one having a really crappy day.
But it wasn't over by a long shot. He was walking away when he heard the noise; he had already almost forgotten about the hysterical woman. He heard a crash, a small explosion of brick and glass. He whipped his head around in time to see that a wall had been knocked out of the store the woman had come running out of. It had been knocked out from inside; there was a ton of brick and glass fragments falling all over the sidewalk and street. Then the man appeared. He came out right over the pile of rubble. He was holding his head with both hands and shaking, as if he had the mother of all headaches. He lurched sideways. He was about to crash into a section of the store wall that was still standing, so he brought one hand forward to stop himself. Where his hand hit the wall the brick shattered inward and he tripped and fell back into the store.
"Shit!" yelled Damian. He had never seen anything like it.
Even that wasn't the end of it. There had been a car driving by when the man had appeared, and now it stopped and the driver got out. It was a young woman. She ran over to the store and the scene of the confusion with the man, but she didn't even make it over the pile of rubble. She was picking her way through it when there was another little explosion and the woman disappeared. Damian shook his head and looked again, but she still wasn't there. He glanced over and saw that her car was still there, the driver's side door still half-open. He looked back to the store with its wrecked outer wall. The man came back into view, and this time he had a big gash on his forehead. It was probably from his fall. Either that or the most recent explosion. In any case he was lurching around still, and Damian decided it was about time to leave. He didn't know what in the hell was going on, but he didn't really want to find out. He might have gone over to try to help the guy, but after the woman disappeared...
He was almost out of sight of the ruined store when he first noticed it. It was the smell, a distinct smell of burning. It was strong, also, too strong to have drifted over from the store. He looked all around but didn't see any smoke. After a few more seconds he decided that he was wrong, that he was just smelling someone's attempts at barbeque or something.
As he continued to walk it became more distinct. It wasn't barbeque. It was cloth. Someone's clothes were on fire. He took another step or two, then it became extremely obvious where the smell was coming from: it was his clothes that were on fire, his pants.
He stopped, dropped, and rolled just like he was taught to do, but it didn't go out. It got worse, in fact, and started to smoke a little. He rolled some more, but it still didn't go out.
Now he was nervous, and didn't make him feel better when his shirtsleeves caught on fire: first the left, then the right. He beat them frantically against the ground, and the right one did go out for a second, but then it went right on burning.
He stopped. He stood up. He gave himself one big shake. There was obviously something not right. He wasn't in pain. He didn't feel the heat. Sure, it looked like his clothes were on fire and it smelled like his clothes were on fire, but it had to have been a trick. He wasn't really on fire. It was a hallucination, or something.
He kept walking, trying to ignore the fact that it really did look and smell like he was on fire. He told himself he was fine; he wasn't really on fire. If it did start to feel hot and it did start to hurt then he would worry, but until then there was no problem.
Unfortunately, if it was a hallucination other people suffered from it also. People were definitely staring at him. One girl was pointing at him. He pretended he didn't see her.
His cell phone rang. It took two rings before he figured out what the noise was. Feeling like something out of a painting by Dali he reached around, his arm still burning, and unzipped the outer pocket of his backpack and pulled out the phone.
"Hello?"
It was his father. "Oh thank God, Damian. Your mother isn't picking up and neither is your brother." He sounded more frantic than Damian could remember ever hearing him before.
He didn't know what to think. He was still too confused by the man who had destroyed the shop, the disappearing woman, and his own burning clothes. He couldn't make sense out of what his father was saying. And, since he was already mad at his dad, this confusion didn't make him feel like being very friendly.
"Damian?"
"Yeah?"
"Where is your brother? Go find him right now. I want to know he's safe."
It occurred to Damian that his father thought he was at school. On the other hand, was it really that hard to believe that he wouldn't go to school, after what his asshole parents had told him the night before? Especially his dad. "I'm not at school right now, Dad. And I don't really give much of a crap if Ty is safe."
"Damian!" He paused. "Please, please just forget about last night. This is..."
"Forget about last night? Dad!"
"Damn it, Damian, listen to me. We've been attacked, got it? We've been attacked by terrorists."
He heard it and he understood all of the words, but he didn't get it. "What are you..."
"Shut up! We've been attacked and you need to find out if Ty and your mother are alright!"
"I just told you: I'm not at school."
"Then get to school!" He was screaming by this point.
Damian was shocked. None of it made any sense.
"Damian!"
"Fine!" he screamed back. "Fine, I'm going!" He took the phone away from his ear and jammed the End button.
Even more people were staring at him now. He felt like screaming at all of them to leave him alone. Instead he reached around and put the phone back into his backpack pocket. He sighed and turned back toward school. There wouldn't be a bus for a little while, so it would probably take him a good twenty or thirty minutes to get back to school. And that was if they let him on the bus.
A minute or two later he found himself back at the store; the front wall was still demolished, the sidewalk was still covered in rubble, and the woman was still missing. Except that now her car was also, he realized. He wondered whether she did reappear or whether some crook took advantage of the door being open and stole it.
It was a minute or two after that before someone finally said something to him. It was a guy not much older than him. He started by swearing loudly, which got Damian's attention.
Then he said, "You're on fire, dude!"
Damian wondered whether he should explain to the guy that he already knew. He figured it wasn't worth it.
"Dude, your backpack's burning!"
That time he did stop and pay attention. He took off his backpack. It was in open flame, and the top had already been burned through. He threw it on the ground and opened it up, only to find that all the paper inside was burning. He grabbed as many notebooks and textbooks and as he could fit his hand around and pulled them out. That only put them in contact with his burning shirt, though, and they started to burn worse. The top notebook turned into a pile of ash before his eyes.
"Here!" said someone. He looked up and found a man holding a water bottle toward him.
"Thanks!" he said and opened his hands to catch it. The man threw it to him and he caught it, opened it up, and poured water over the burning pile. It didn't help much. Now everything was either burnt or wet, and either way he couldn't read it. And he had emptied it out, so he had nothing to use on his backpack.
"What about you, your clothes?" asked the man who had given him the water.
"Don't worry about it." What else was he supposed to say? He still didn't feel the heat from the flames.
It wasn't long before his old piece-of-crap backpack was too far gone to worry about. So much for his school stuff. He pulled out the cell phone, the CD player, and the CD case, all of which were starting to melt a little from the flames. He put the cell into his pocket and kept walking in the general direction of his school.
A block or two later he realized that the flames had traveled all the way up his legs to his crotch. He still didn't feel them but that was just a little too creepy, so he stopped and beat them back. It worked well enough, for once, but he still didn't feel much better; he couldn't help but notice that the flames had consumed the material of his pants to the knee on the right side and to halfway up the shin on the left side. His sleeves were shorter than before, too.
He decided he would be better off running. Hopefully that way he would be to the school before all of his clothes were burned away. And there was the wind he was creating as he ran; that might help slow down the flames a little.
After a few seconds he had been wrong; the wind made the flames worse, not better. Even so it would be better for him to get to school faster.
He was almost to his bus stop when his phone rang again. It was loud; he had the ringer on high so he could hear it from his backpack. He had it out before the tune of the ringer had gone through once. He slowed to a walk as he answered it.
"Hello?"
"Damian, where are you?" It was his dad again. He was still screaming.
"I'm on my way. I'm having some trouble, okay?"
"Just...just hurry." He wasn't screaming anymore, which was nice. Unfortunately, he also sounded depressed.
"Dad?"
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. It was broken not by screams or by words at all. It was broken by sobs.
"Dad?"
"Your mom's on the way to the hospital. She...she's not going to make it."
Damian stopped dead. "What?"
"She...she wasn't breathing when I got home. I called the ambulance..."
"Dad?"
"She was blue. It's too late."
His mom was dead? That couldn't be right. His mom was fine. She had been crying the night before, sure, but there was nothing physically wrong with her. And of course he hadn't seen her this morning, but he'd heard her. She had been in the kitchen. If he had wanted to he could have gone down and gotten her to make breakfast for him like she did for Ty. He had used the side door instead so he didn't have to face her, but he could have seen her. His dad had to have been wrong.
"Damian, don't come home."
"Huh?"
"Don't come home. Just go to your brother. Make...make sure he's okay, and just stay there. You hear me?"
"Yeah, I hear you. But look...Mom was just in the kitchen..."
"Damian, don't come home." He left out a couple of sobs. "Bye." The phone line went silent.
Now he was even more confused than before. Why would his dad tell him not to come home? Why would he have said Mom wasn't going to make it?
Most of a block ahead of him the bus was just pulling in at the stop. That would be his bus. He ran for it and made it just in time.
"What the hell?" said the bus driver. "Kid, you're on fire!"
"And my mom just died, too. What about it?" It had gotten to be too much. Just too much.
The bus driver didn't close the door, but Damian wasn't about to go anywhere. He had to get to school, to see his brother. His brother would have some idea what was going on. He would be able to explain the joke, how he made it so that Damian's clothes caught on fire, why he told Dad to tell him Mom had died and that he wasn't allowed to come home.
"Go!" he yelled. It was startling enough that the bus driver closed the doors behind him. Damian walked up the steps and right past the driver without paying. People stared at him as he started down the aisle.
The bus was moving now. It wouldn't be long now before he got to school.
He rode the whole way standing up. Part of it was that he didn't want to burn the seats, but he also wanted to be able to get off as quickly as possible. It also allowed him to pace, which made him feel a little less overwhelmed, even if it didn't really help anything.
The time the bus stopped his clothes were in burned tatters. At least they hadn't fallen off yet, though.
When he finally made it to school he got a very bad feeling. It was too quiet. He went inside and the sounds of him gasping for breath echoed off the tile walls; he had run the whole way and had tired himself out, but his breathing still wasn't THAT much louder than usual.
All of the classrooms had something over the little glass windows, and it wasn't long before he figured out what was happening: it was an intruder/terrorism drill. The school had a special alarm in case some student came to school with a gun or there was a terrorist attack or something, where everybody sat still in the rooms and was quiet and you turned off the lights, locked the doors, and covered the windows in the doors.
It took him another couple of rooms before he had processed the information, but when he did he stopped. What if it wasn't a drill? What if there really was a terrorist attack? That's what his dad had said. He stared at the nearest door with its cheerful green window covering. Terrorists had attacked?
It didn't matter, he decided, or at least he had to find his brother anyway. He looked around. Now that he thought about it, he realized he didn't know which class his brother had. He did sort of know Ty's schedule, but if he had known where all the classes were he still wouldn't have known which one he was in now; he didn't know what period it was. But he couldn't just stand there and do nothing. He ran over to the library, remembering that it had a nice big clock in it and thinking it might be open still. It wasn't. Then he remembered the sundial in the quad. It wasn't really a clock, but at least it had the numbers printed right on the ground. He ran out to the quad. There wasn't a whole lot of sun, but there was enough to make a shadow. It was about 10:20. That would make it just the beginning of third period. Still, he didn't see any groups of students winding their way to their classes. They would still all have been in their second period classes still, unless the alarm had gone off so long ago that they were still in their first period classes. But Ty didn't have a first period class, so he wouldn't have been allowed into class at all if the alarm had already gone off. So second period it was. Ty's second period was math, and his teacher was Mrs. Piani. He knew where her room was and he went there.
Once he got there he found he didn't know what to do. He was still on fire, now more than ever, so he had to hurry and find a way to make it in to his brother. He didn't know how to go about doing that, so he figured he would start with the obvious approach: he knocked on the door.
"Ty!" he yelled through the door, "It's Damian. Open up." He tried the door, but it was locked like he thought it would be. He waited, but so no answer came so he tried again.
The door opened and Ty grabbed him and dragged him into the room. "You stupid...What the hell?" He was looking at the flames burning through Damian's shirt and pants.
"You tell me."
"What? Put it out!" He threw Damian to the floor of the classroom and tried to put out the flames.
"It's...hey! It's no use!" He said, trying to defend himself.
"What do you mean? Put it out!"
"It's not burning me!"
Ty kept trying to put out the flames.
"I said it's not burning me!"
Finally Ty backed off. His hands were red, burned.
Damian was confused. He got to his feet. "What?"
"That's my line. What the hell is going on?"
"It burned you?"
"No, it sang to me!"
Damian didn't know what to say. He had seen it burn his clothes, and he had seen it burn the paper in his backpack, but he didn't guess that it would actually burn people.
"Tell me what the hell is going on!" demanded Ty. Everyone in the classroom was staring.
"We have to go to the hospital."
Ty was getting mad now. He looked like he was going to punch Damian.
"Dad called and said he went home and Mom wasn't breathing and they took her to the hospital and he said not to come back and he didn't know why you weren't answering your phone and..."
"Damian, shut up!"
"We have to go."
"You aren't allowed to leave," said Mrs. Piani.
"We have to go!" He was talking directly to Ty, ignoring the old math teacher.
"We don't know what's happening out there," said Mrs. Piani. She was also talking to Ty.
Ty turned back to Damian. "She's right. There were all these noises, these bangs. People were screaming. Who knows what the hell is happening out there."
"I just came from there! There's nothing!" He grabbed Ty's arm.
"Shit!" He jerked his arm away from Damian. "What the hell was that?" There was now a big red burn where Damian had touched his brother. He stared at his brother, and everyone else stared at him.
"Well I'm going!" He left without looking back. He had gone 60 or 70 feet when the door opened and Ty came out.
"Hey! Wait!"
He didn't wait, but Ty caught up with him anyway.
"Mom wasn't breathing?"
"I don't know." Or he pretended he didn't, anyway. It was easier that way.
When they got to the car Ty unlocked the doors then looked at Damian before getting in. "You're going to burn the seat."
"Just drive!" He got in.
"At least lean forward or something."
Damian did. Ty drove.
When they got to the hospital there was nowhere to park. Ty ditched the car illegally at the end of a row. They ran inside, where they found the waiting room overrun with people. Even so, Damian attracted the attention of a nurse.
After some negotiation they convinced her Damian didn't need to be put out, and that they needed to see their mom. The problem was that there wasn't any record of her entering the hospital.
"There's no Valerie Sayers?"
"No, sorry." She was looking over the list of patients. "There's a Martin Sayers." She shrugged.
"What?" demanded Ty.
"You know him?"
"He's our dad!"
"He was admitted with the symptoms of radiation poisoning."
"Where is he?" That definitely didn't sound good.
"Room 418, but he..." They were already leaving. "Hey, wait!"
Damian slowed down enough to listen to what she had to say.
"Are you sure you're okay?"
He waved her off. "Fine!" He ran and caught up with Ty.
When they found him Damian, for one, almost wished they hadn't. He was unconscious. His skin had ugly red blotches over it. His hair was thinner. His whole body was thinner. He looked like a person does after fighting off a disease for a long time, like a year or more.
"What are you doing here?" asked someone in scrubs, probably a doctor.
"That's our dad!"
"He's in no condition to be receiving visitors. Please leave."
"He's our dad!" Ty was yelling at this point. Apparently he was loud enough to wake up Dad. He stirred, blinked his eyes, and looked at them.
"Ty? Damian?" His voice was weak, far too weak.
"Dad!"
"Do you realize you're on fire?" asked the doctor of Damian.
"I told you not to come home. I didn't want you to see me."
"Dad..."
"Where is Mom?" asked Damian.
Instead of answering he closed his eyes and swallowed. He looked like he was in terrible pain.
"Where is she?" pressed Ty.
"She's already gone," Damian answered. He had known even before he had asked, even before they had driven to the hospital, back when Dad had told him. He just hadn't believed it. Not until now.
"You have to leave," repeated the doctor. "This man has received a severe dose of radiation. He isn't safe to be around. He's going to be moved in just a moment."
"Radiation. Why? How?" Ty looked back and forth from the doctor to his dad as he spoke, inviting either man to answer his questions.
Finally the doctor had gotten tired of waiting. He grabbed Ty by the arm and pulled him out of the room. He was less willing to grab onto Damian.
"You need to go, Damian," said his dad. "I'm just glad you boys are alright. I'm sorry if I ever hurt you." He closed his eyes again.
"Dad?" He walked right up to his bedside. "Dad?" He felt tears coming to his eyes. He fought them back. "Dad?"
"Come on!" That was Ty this time, from outside the room.
Slowly Damian stepped away from his dad's bed. He paused briefly, turned, and walked out.
Back in the waiting room, Damian and Ty weren't very talkative.
"What happened to Mom?" asked Ty, breaking a silence of over a minute.
"When Dad called me he said she wasn't breathing when he found her." He shrugged. "Choked, maybe."
They settled into silence again. Damian, for his part, was thinking about the night before. His dad had all but kicked him out then. And now he was dying. But he had apologized. Damian hadn't. As he realized that he felt a sharp twinge of guilt; he hadn't returned the apology when his dad had apologized to him. Yes his dad had started it, and yes it wouldn't have been nearly as bad if his dad hadn't gotten mad and started insulting him, but Damian certainly hadn't been a gentleman back. And now his dad was dying and he had missed his chance to apologize.
His mom wasn't any better. She hadn't been angry the way his dad had been, but she had cried. Her reaction was almost worse. And he hadn't even had a chance to see her before she died. He remembered back to that morning, an eternally long time past, to when he was thinking about how much he hated his parents and Ty. Had anything not changed since then?
"Damian?"
"Yeah?"
"Your pants."
His pants had finally burned through. If he were to stand up now they would fall away completely. He had to wonder whether God just had to add that little insult on top of taking away his mother and father. "Now what?"
"We need to find a way to put out that flame, then we can go home and get more clothes."
"Yeah." He hadn't been able to think of a way to put it out before, and at the moment he wasn't feeling very creative.
"I think you have to put it out."
"Why?"
"It's coming from inside of you."
It was a simple sentence, but it was incomprehensible to Damian. The fire was coming from inside of him? How could fire have been coming from inside of him? Why wouldn't he had have burned from the inside out already? Did Ty even know what he was saying?
"I guess you'll just be on fire until you figure out how to put it out."