“Goodbye is a word with teeth, sharp and final.
Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance.“
– John Steinbeck
Can you hear me?
Josie lifts her throbbing forehead from the top of the cold, metal payphone. They’ve torn pages from the outdated, frayed phonebook and stuck them all across the inside of the booth windows with their spit and their sweat.
They’ve hidden themselves from the world, and all of its teeth.
Outside, the shadows linger, growling. They lurk beyond the glass. They see with eyes both sightless and sharp.
They wait. They prowl. Their patience is inhuman.
In the afternoon sun, all is quiet, all but the shambling drag of feet and the gasping, guttural suck of air.
The names of people she’ll never know – people quite possibly dead – dance and shimmer fallowed across this little space; their cramped, dilapidated, forgotten sanctuary on the rundown outskirts of town.
She hasn’t seen a phonebooth in years.
She’s surprised the line still works.
Josephine, I think we’ve a bad connection.
Are you hearing me at all?
How about now?
She swallows hard. The light hurts her eyes, dulled as it may be. The swallow hurts her throat.
She looks up at the tall stranger cramped up beside her, his broad shoulders pushed back against the doors.
He’s greying around the temples. His nose is slightly crooked. Fear and panic glisten across his forehead, but there is a kindness there, too; the deep-etched patience of a family man.
He has eyes like the sky, she thinks, so big and bright and blue, and the way he looks at her with those eyes twists her stomach into knots.
She turns back to the phone in her hand.
“Yeah, mom, I can hear you just fine.”
“I need to tell you something, I don’t know how much time we have left. I need you to just – please – let me say what I need to say.
I love you.
I need to get that out right now; just in case.
I’m phoning to say goodbye.
I’m phoning to say, thank you.
I know I didn’t say these things enough. I know that I wasn’t ever enough.
Thank you for loving me anyway.
I’m so sorry for how things between us have been, the last while. I’m so sorry for saying the awful, unforgiveable things I have said.
I was sorry every single time, and I’d take it all back, if I could.
Thank you for loving me anyway.
I know how alone you’ve been, since dad died. I know how empty and unattractive and unwanted you’ve felt. I know you’ve carried a lot of hurt in your heart, and I should have been there with you when you were breaking.
I should have been there for you, instead of pushing you away.
Thank you for loving me anyway.
I wish I had more time. I’ve wasted so much goddamn time.
I don’t know what’s waiting for us, on the other side, but I hope with all my soul that we’ll see each other again, some day. Maybe in a different time, or a different place, and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to be your daughter all over again.
I promise, next time I’ll do better.”
Josie, honey…
Can you hear me now?
I’ll try stepping outside
– the lines have been dreadful all day –
and have you been watching the news?
Terrib – –
She wants to tell her mother not to go outside; not ever. She wants to tell her mother that it isn’t safe.
Nothing – nowhere – is safe anymore.
The great, masticating hoard is on the way. It’s spreading across the entire world, rampant and unforgiving. Its legs do not grow tired. Its lungs do not scream for air. Its heart does not beat, does not feel what we feel. It knows no remorse, no regret, no guilt; it knows only the ache of hunger.
It tramples everything in its path, leaving only horror behind.
Those awful jaws could already be closing in on her.
She wants to say this, but the line goes dead.
For a while, she stands trembling and listening to the lifeless, empty silence at the other end of the line.
And then, finally, rattles the phone back into its cradle.
“That was our last coin,” says the man quietly.
Josie nods, looking out into the sunlit street through a small gap between their makeshift shutters. The road rises and falls like the ocean, teeming.
A shadow lurches by noisily.
She turns away.
“How are you feeling?” he whispers with a downward nod.
They stand staring at her arm.
Josie gingerly retracts a bloodied sleeve, revealing the hideously discoloured limb; pale and blue from the wrist up, bruised brown and putrid around the grotesque, ragged bite-mark in the crook of her elbow.
It’s devouring her alive, from the inside out.
“It’s a write-off,” she says, wiping the sting of sweat from her brow.
“I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”
She glances up at him.
“How do I look?”
He smiles, terrified, slowly nods his head up and down.
“You look fine,” he lies.
She nods knowingly, tugging the hem back down across her nerves afire
It begins with infection.
Within just a few hours the fever, confusion and dementia will follow.
The nausea is unbearable, relentless, without mercy.
Absolute loss of muscular coordination.
Soon, paralysis.
And then, if you’re lucky enough, a coma of sweet, unfeeling, unconscious oblivion.
It isn’t much longer, then, until the heart stops. The brain expires shortly after.
Then death.
And then, reanimation.
“Do you think I’ll make it?” he asks.
“Do you think I’ll see my family again?”
She wants to tell him the truth. She wants to tell him that, probably, it’s all going down the goddamn drain, in anyway.
Radiation. Diabetes. Stupidity.
Fuckin’ pangolins.
This world severe, it’s brimming with unsound time-bombs.
She wants to tell him that, even if he could somehow fight his way out of this deathtrap, and all the way down the swarming street, and all the streets after that, and all the way back home, he probably wouldn’t like what he finds when he gets there.
He may find his home changed.
He may find his wife and children unwelcoming.
She wants to tell him these things, but, instead, she straightens up from tying her bootlaces and stares at him.
Into those eyes so big and bright and blue.
And offers him a single nod.
“I hope that you do.”
“You don’t need to do this,” the man says, shaking his head.
She can feel the virus moving, changing her, turning her inside out, creeping like a fate worse than death through her already-constricting veins.
She can still feel those wide, ink-black rotten maws clamping down around her arm, again and again. She can still feel those jagged teeth, like broken tombstones, sinking all the way into her flesh. She can smell it, she can smell herself, souring.
She can smell death in her own perspiration.
“I’m done for,” she says.
“You know what will happen in here, if I stay. This way, at least you’ve got a chance.”
He stares at her, saying nothing.
He nods, lifts the blood-stained machete and holds it up by the grip in the close, clammy space between them. Josie shakes her head, paling around all the edges.
“You’ll need that more than I will.”
She nods toward the phonebooth door.
“Ready when you are.”
“I’ll hold them off,” she says quietly.
“You make a run for it.”
And don’t you dare, fuck this up, by looking back.
The door unbolts, crashes open.
Josie hurls herself out into the searing daylight.
The hoard floods in, swallows her whole.
Sinks.
Spirals.
Devours.
She hears the wet, swinging hack of the machete, again and again.
When she looks up, he’s gone.
Only the hoard remains, of unseeing unstill eyes and unhinged jaws and rancid lolling tongues and ashen skin curling away from lumps of flesh collapsing quivered from sickly yellow bone, and the smell of it, the noise of it, it’s all so much worse than she’d imagined.
And she really hopes that he made it out.
She hopes she’s done something good, and selfless, for once in her life.
She hopes that her mother might hear of this, one day.
She stands before the ocean, and all of its teeth.
The shuddering wave stampedes across her body, unfurls her, undoes her, unstrings her.
It sings crashing songs of crushing hunger, sweeping sonnets to starvation, an elegy for the end-times; a roaring, deafening ode to all the many displaced pieces of her.
The coffin-dark wave collapses, and recedes.
And she follows the writhe of the tide.
All the way back.
And into the sea.
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The Strange Brontides 