Page 137 of Chaos

Some of the mess in the air clears, hot smoke shifting for cooler, dustier air, with more visibility. A lump moves.

Behind me, Shane calls out. “Frankie?”

“Here!” That triggers a new round of coughing.

The moving lump isn’t Shane. It’s someone else.

“I have Ephie,” he shouts. “Are you okay?”

So the moving lump isn’t Ephie either.

That only leaves one person.

I shift my wait to my knees, my arms are covered in blood and dirt and smoke. “Okay. You?”

“Fine!” Shane coughs, as I manage to make my way to my feet, and stagger closer to that moving lump.

Everything about it is brown and dusty like me, the moving lump, except the whites around one dusty gray eye. One eye is gone, half of his face a mess of blood turned to mud by dust.

“Ephie … lived?” he croaks as a shaft of golden light breaks free of the clouds, feeble at first, then thicker, sharper, as if burnished and polished.

I sway on my feet on a rush of vertigo, my back burning, my right leg stiff as I stand over him. One filthy man who caused so much strife.

“Do you care?” I ask.

“Yes,” he whispers.

“It’s hard to believe that’s true.”

He coughs. “You’re hard to kill.”

“So are you.” I cough, too, my lungs burning with every spasm as the sunlight hits a million, maybe a billion particles of dust, swimming on the air around us, turning them to glitter. “I poisoned you.”

His voice is resigned, accepting, unashamed as he says, “You … did?”

“Multiply times.” I squat down closer to Ben. I could pick up a rubble rock. There’s a dusty brick right beside me. I could finish it now.

“How’s that … feel?” he asks.

I think about it. “My only regret is that it didn’t work faster.”

Behind me Shane and Ephie keep calling out, shuffling in the dusty, smoky air, which is slowly settling and clearing.

New wind brings cleaner air, sending the glitter rolling and curling and causing a fresh round of coughing from all of us, clearing away so I can see even more clearly.

“I thought the worst part of the plague would be the plague itself,” I whisper as a bubble of blood spills over Ben’s lips.

Billions of people died and their bodies rotted and became food for flies and rats and buzzards and bacteria.

What could be worse than that?

There was nowhere to go but up. Life was a honey bee flying on sunbeams from a daisy to a rose just for a different flavor of sweet.

Until this man lifted a hammer.

He didn’t just smash Shane’s hand that day in the sunshine.

He smashed order.

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