Part One: Sunday, November 12th

 

Doc woke in a strange house, covered in blood.

Awareness came to him piecemeal: crying in an adjacent room; the bad smells of shit and blood, both smells he knew professionally; the sight of lavender walls, rock and roll posters, and an oversized blue ribbon, its big sunflower head emblazoned "NUMBER ONE KID!" in gold caps, the whole scene blacked with swaths of dark blood.

A clock lying upside down on the floor read 10:22. The room’s shades were drawn, their edges seamed in sunlight.

His last clear memory was Saturday night, around 11:00, watching boxing on HBO…not a very good fight, heavyweights. He remembered knocking back a few beers while Janice slept on the adjacent loveseat, looking happy and warm beneath the afghan she’d knitted the previous winter.

Time had passed. Things had happened. Bad things.

He was hurt.

He inventoried the trauma: a dislocated shoulder, a broken nose, separated knuckles, a missing fingernail. His testicles felt like they had been slammed in a car door, and a throbbing pain in his upper left thigh, paired with warm wetness there, told him he had suffered a puncture wound. His head hurt. His mouth was dry and coppery with clotted blood.

I’ve been in shock, he thought. I’ve suffered horrible injuries, and I’ve been in shock, but now I’m back again, and I need help.

Doc struggled to his elbows. The room spun, and he vomited. Long, retching heaves brought burning pain—broken ribs, too?—and left him spitting and sweating over a reeking puddle studded with chunks of half-digested meat and…cloth?

Shreds of cloth in his vomit?

He shook his head. His brain felt like a discarded squeeze toy.

Doc managed, with much effort, to stand. The room spun again, then slowed to a wobble. He leaned against an unmade bed with a lacy pink canopy. At his feet lay a toppled nightstand, one corner squashing the fuzzy head of a white teddy bear that stared at the opposite wall, where hung posters familiar to Doc, who had two teenage daughters of his own. Taylor Swift. Justin Bieber. Selena Gomez. Beneath them sat a vanity cluttered in perfume bottles and stuffed animals.

Doc stood before the vanity mirror. I look like a cougar mauled me. He wore only sneakers and striped boxer shorts stained in blood. The sneakers, a pair of shiny white Nikes leopard-spotted with blood, he’d never before seen. Cuts and scratches, some looking very much like the work of human nails, crosshatched his body. At the center of his upper thigh yawned a serious puncture wound, and a split in his scalp had leaked blood down his face to his mouth, which oozed an emerald green slime.

What the hell had he gotten into?

"Help," the voice down the hall cried. "Help me."

Doc’s professional instincts kicked him in the ass. He staggered out of the room.

"Help," the voice called again.

Doc followed the pleas to the end of the hall.

An injured woman lay weeping on the floor, the room around her trashed, stuff everywhere, things smashed to pieces, blood on the walls here, too. She looked a natural addition to the scene: eyes swollen shut, teeth missing, nose askew, a fan of blood dried beneath it. With one arm she hugged her abdomen, from which a black-dark delta of blood had drained down her shirt and pants; the other arm jutted away, bent in too many places, as if it had three or four elbows rather than one. When she saw Doc, her eyes flared and her screaming peaked.

"I can help you," Doc said. "I’m a doctor."

She shook her head and tried to scoot backward. It was an awkward attempt; her legs didn’t seem to be working, and she wouldn’t remove her arm from her stomach. The shattered arm did her no good at all.

"Settle down," Doc said. "We’re all right, now."

But as he advanced, she screamed all the louder.

Then Doc recognized her. She was the jogger from the next cul-de-sac over in his development; the one he admired each morning as she ran past, regardless of the weather, her long legs pumping, her ponytail bobbing, the best-looking woman in the neighborhood, though she didn’t look so good now, coming apart, covered in blood, screaming.

Doc stood, staring, as dark thoughts rose like swamp gasses from the brackish backwaters of his mind. His eyes focused on her abdomen, just below the floating rib, where several inches of plump, externally herniated intestine shone in the light.

He licked his lips. What would it taste like?

Doc staggered backward with a shudder. He shook his head. What the hell was going on here?

"Please go away!" the woman yelled.

Doc tried to speak, but found no words and hurried into the hall, through a living room, through a kitchen—all of it looking tornado-struck—forcing his gaze straight ahead, noticing but not wanting to notice the spill of blond hair just visible from behind the puffy recliner. Whatever you do, he warned himself, do not look behind that chair.

Obeying this command, he limped from the house into a world blindingly bright. Flurries fluttered out of a hard blue sky. Doc stood and squinted. Not flurries, but ash. Ash swirled everywhere, as if a nearby volcano had blown its top…but central Pennsylvania wasn’t exactly rimmed in volcanoes.

Gunshots snapped Doc into awareness. He couldn’t determine the exact location of the shooting; from the looks of the neighborhood, it could have come from anywhere. Wisps of smoke rose from all directions, and what had been the Tudor on the corner of Cherry and Kimberwick smoldered now, reduced to a wide, black circle. In the near distance, someone shrieked. Off in another direction, more gunshots sounded.

Filled with dread, Doc staggered homeward through drifting ash. Every block unfolded as further epilogue to some untold disaster. Broken windows, burned houses, cars smashed in the street. Doc’s injuries screamed, and his muscles cramped, but he bore on, needing to find Janice and the kids safe at home.

Halfway down Maple Street lay a man in a purple and green jacket. Doc lurched to a stop but saw at a glance there was no helping this guy; half his head spread across the pavement like a bug smashed across a windshield. The remainder of his head held an improbable smile, as if all this was just one big joke, a pisser of epic proportions.

Just what the hell was going on?

A roar sounded, and a military Hummer rounded the corner. Doc stared as the transport drew to the curb and a soldier wearing a gas mask and hazmat gear rose from the top hatch and pointed at him with a machine gun.

The soldier shouted, gesturing with the rifle.

Doc blinked.

Then the words, muffled by the gas mask, unzipped in Doc’s brain: "On the ground!"

Staring through dark, flat disks, the soldier repeated his command.

Doc dropped to his knees then slumped forward on the ashy pavement, his face coming to rest mere inches from an empty green bottle. Cougar Beer, the label read over an image of College Heights’ mascot panther, The World’s #1 Microbrew!

And watching a single flake of ash settle gently onto the beer bottle, Doc conducted yet another futile search of his disrupted memory.

What the hell had happened Saturday night?