Ante Mortem

HIT THE WALL David Dunwoody

“We’re under attack.”

Brautigan looked up from his lap. He’d been smoothing and re-smoothing creases in search of substance, thinking about the days when there was no question about it, the days when his light-headed haze was the result of something other than lack of sleep. An uninterrupted nap would, at this point, be as good as any vacation. And he’d almost been lulled to sleep by the jostling of the airport shuttle when Pearce said those words. Then the bassist said them again. “We’re under attack.”

Pearce was looking at his phone, reading from some news app. “Cessna flew right into downtown Shawburg. We’re like thirty minutes away, brother. We’re driving right into it.”

“A prop plane?” Brautigan cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes. “Could be an accident, buddy—remember that one in Manhattan, I think it was, few years back—same thing.” He glanced toward the front, at the young Middle Eastern driver, and hoped Pearce wouldn’t raise his voice in argument. Naturally, he did.

“It was going to happen sooner or later,” Pearce intoned, pointing the phone at Brautigan like an accusing finger. “And of course it’s gonna be a little private plane. Hell, it could be loaded up with anthrax or something.” He consulted the app and muttered, “We’re driving right into it…”

No way the driver hadn’t overheard by now. And knowing Pearce, it was only a matter of time before he started speculating about which sand-race had carried out this supposed attack. What a fucking gig, Brautigan thought. What a rock band. A gaggle of paranoid old men, looking to blame someone for everything. They belonged on covered porches with wicker chairs and sun teas. Brautigan was pushing six-oh, and Pearce, who always lied about his age, was certainly not far behind. Same for their drummer and keyboardist, likely snoring away in the other shuttle with the rest of the gear. No roadies for these never-weres. No groupies either. While it was true that Brautigan’s silver ponytail and hawkish gaze still attracted a certain breed of young female, they all reminded him too much of his own daughter.

And, though neither Pearce nor anyone else knew it, she was the real reason for the Shawburg bookings, for this miserable sleepless caravan. At the thought of Lacey, the first twinge of anxiety struck Brautigan, and he thought, I hope to God she was nowhere near that plane crash.

He glanced toward the front and saw the driver eyeing them in the rearview mirror. Pearce began to speak again, and Brautigan nudged his shin with the tip of a snakeskin boot. Pearce looked from him to the driver and rolled his eyes. “Seth Brautigan, the politically-correct headbanger.”

“Frankly, that makes more sense than you—” Brautigan began, and then the shuttle veered sharply and crossed the expressway into the path of a bus.

Maybe Pearce has a point.

Last week, when the Iranian youths started lighting themselves on fire, we thought it was a political protest, the birth of a revolution. Then it happened in Toronto, and Mexico City—kids setting themselves aflame and others rushing into the burning pillars and embracing their own deaths. The media went nuts about the so-called mass hysteria, which they had apparently fomented by airing the Iranian suicides, which they then aired again and again.

And now this. So maybe Pearce is right. Maybe it’s a religious thing, a network of apocalyptic extremists. Maybe that’s why the Cessna went down. Why our driver just plowed us into a bus. Why I’m upside-down and can’t feel my face or my legs.

Brautigan slipped out of his seat belt a little. His head settled on the roof of the shuttle, tiny glass jags biting into his scalp. He fumbled across his waist and unbuckled himself, slumping down. His ears were ringing and he couldn’t see a thing. Didn’t smell smoke, or gas… Jesus, am I blind?

“Pearce,” he croaked. There was no reply. He lay there, upside-down and bent, while his eyes adjusted to the blackness. No, he wasn’t blind. He could clearly see his thirty-year sparring partner hanging dead from his seat, arms draped over his cruelly dented head.

Brautigan wormed his way toward the front of the vehicle. Now he could see that the shuttle was lying in the shadow of the overturned bus, and he could hear moans and cries and the tinkling of glass. He grabbed the front seats and pulled himself up beside the crumpled form of the driver. It looked as if his face had bounced off the windshield. Killed instantly, no doubt. The feeling was returning to Brautigan’s legs. He got on his elbows and knees and crawled through the shattered windshield, and then he was right up against the bus and its sideshow of broken faces within broken windows. He heard pleas for assistance. Couldn’t they see the state he was in?

He thought of Lacey again. Of course those people saw him, but they didn’t care. They had daughters they needed to reach. He understood that. He hoped they would understand as he continued on.

He moved out of the bus’ shadow and into the sunlight, facing four lanes of stalled traffic, a few bloodied passengers stumbling about, motorists rushing to their aid and screaming into phones. A chopper passed by and swung around; Brautigan felt that the camera inside was focused on him, staggering to the shoulder, ignoring the onlookers as he headed into the city.

In a new haze, he wandered into concrete canyons. He stopped at the first intersection to get his bearings. It had to be around 10 AM and traffic was surprisingly light. As he stared at the street signs and waited for his eyes to focus, he heard the first sirens. An ambulance tore past, running the red light. It was followed by a Volkswagen Beetle. Why in the hell…? His question was answered as the Beetle rolled up the curb, inches from his leg, and smashed into the side of the building at his back. He watched numbly as a teenage girl hurtled through the windshield and rolled down the sidewalk.

Another crash. Brautigan turned and saw a minivan folding around a traffic pole. Most cars had come to an abrupt stop. The minivan went over on its side and came to a stop in the middle of the intersection. And then, as if in some obscene dance, a brown sedan from the east and a blue sedan from the west wove around the van and met head-on.

They’re all killing themselves. Everyone is killing themselves.

The world is ending.

Lacey!

Brautigan broke into a run, and for the first time he felt pain. It radiated through his back, thighs and ankles with every footfall, but the sensation only spurred him forth. He’d seen the dead-eyed gaze of the young man in the blue sedan. They were all young, weren’t they? Kids. He ran faster.

He knew where he was now, and knew how to get to the club where Lacey was scheduled to play that night. Neither she nor his band had known that they shared a double bill. Brautigan’s ensemble Hell Roof was supposed to make a surprise appearance alongside Lacey’s Sīth. In his mind he’d thought that maybe, at first, she’d be thrown. She’d stand silent, as she saw him for the first time in eleven years, as he walked onto the stage during her set with guitar in hand. And maybe, just maybe, instead of walking off, she’d play along for the audience and riff with him like it was a natural thing. And maybe somewhere in there, in that performance, they’d get past the awkward angry shit and then they could just talk like he always wanted. It was a mean trick, he knew, but it was the last trick he had up his sleeve.

He probably looked like a relapsed junkie as he shambled into Cori’s. Lacey’s band played there most weekends, and there was a chance she might be around this early. And she was.

Back to him, hair dyed shocking red, but undeniably his Lacey, staring intently at a TV above the bar with her knuckles pressed against her lips. He was afraid to come any closer, to make himself known. So he watched the TV with her. A passenger plane had gone down in Texas. In his last transmission, the pilot had reportedly told the tower that “kids” were trying to storm the cockpit.

Brautigan and Lacey both nearly jumped out of their snakeskin boots as two cars collided right outside. She spun, and saw him. “Dad.”

He stepped into the light separating them. She recoiled at his appearance, then said, “What happened?”

“Fucking shuttle drove right into… Pearce is dead. I don’t even know about the others. I just came here. It’s happening everywhere, Lacey.”

“I know.” She took a tentative step toward him, hazel eyes flashing. “Why are you here?”

“Came to see you.”

She sighed. “Because of what’s happening?”

“No, it was planned…”

She turned slowly to the pair behind the bar, two men with their arms linked. They looked from the television to her. “He called me last week,” one of them said to her. “It was a surprise.”

“Surprise.” She laughed bitterly. “Dad—Seth—I’ve got enough to deal with right now. My best friend OD’d this morning. And don’t try to play Father Knows Best and lecture me, you know I stay away from users. She’d never touched the shit before.”

“Young people are killing themselves,” Brautigan said.

“It’s people between fourteen and twenty-four so far,” Lacey replied. “Like my friend. I’m twenty-six.” She said it as if he might not know.

“So terrible,” one of the men whispered. Another breaking item appeared on the TV, this one about the streets; streets worldwide turning into a gory spectacle by suicidal drivers. A scene in Atlanta, an intersection in flames. First responders simply throwing themselves onto the pyre.

Lacey started toward the exit. Brautigan caught her arm. “You’re safer here than out there.”

“Let go of me,” she snapped, and wrenched herself free. He nearly fell over.

“Lacey!”

She looked back. “You need to get to a hospital.”

“Won’t be safe there either,” he said. “The panic’s going to be worse than the catalyst. We’ll just stay here.”

A gunshot rang out in the street. “Please!” Brautigan cried. “Don’t be stubborn now.”

“You should get out of the city,” one of the club owners called. “We have to stay,” said the other. “But you better get the hell out of here.”

Lacey nodded. To her father, she said, “You can stay, or you can come.”

Every bit of logic, every scrap of instinct, told him it was wrong. But she’d just extended an olive branch, thin and brittle as it was, and he took it.

Her car was parked in the back. Brautigan stared at her as she fished through the pockets of her jeans for the keys. “What?” she demanded.

“Can’t use the roads,” he said. “The only way out is on foot.”

She swore softly. “You’re right.” At the sound of another gunshot, she glanced worriedly at Brautigan, and for a moment she was the little girl he’d walked out on. God, it was that same face, that same exact face, silently begging him to make it better.

“We ought to stick to the back streets,” he advised. She nodded, and they began their slow, uncertain jog. Glimpses of the main thoroughfares yielded only sheets of flame. The city’s arteries were clogged with the ruin of smashed cars and mangled bodies. There was the occasional gunshot, and a recurrent thump that might have been distant explosions. Other than that, it was oddly silent. No sirens, no choppers, no chatter. How quickly it had all happened.

“We have to cross 35th to reach the expressway,” Lacey told him. “Then it’s not far to the suburbs. I know people there.”

People my age, Brautigan hoped, and wondered why this epidemic of suicides was confined to that particular age group. Couldn’t be a virus, could it? Some neurological agent targeting the brain chemistry of developing youths, maybe? But how could something like that strike simultaneously worldwide? He wouldn’t even consider the metaphysical. Besides, there wasn’t any scripture on Earth that laid out the end in this manner.

Father and daughter stepped out onto 35th Street. A utility worker’s blackened corpse swung nearby, hands fused to a severed power line. The street itself was a maze of compacted wreckage. That thumping noise was close. Any one of these twisted and bleeding vehicles could explode at any moment. “We’ve gotta move fast,” he said to Lacey. “Now.”

They ran into the street, weaving around columns of hot metal, ignoring the sounds of scratching and what could have been moaning from within the steel. Brautigan wanted to clap his hands over Lacey’s eyes and ears, if only he could still wrap her up in his arms.

A muffled thump came from the right. Brautigan threw himself at Lacey, driving her to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. “What is it?” she screamed.

“I don’t know.” It definitely hadn’t been any sort of explosion. He looked to his right then, and saw what it had been, what all those noises had been.

A boy of about fifteen lay crumpled in the center of a cratered Mazda. He’d jumped. Most of the cars along the curb, Brautigan now saw, were littered with bodies shattered by freefall.

A wail sounded overhead. He looked up and saw an open window several stories up. The boy’s mother was there. Her hands clutched at the air.

Brautigan turned Lacey’s face away from the sight and ushered her toward the expressway ramp. She winced as he urged her along, and he saw that his fingers were digging into the flesh of her arms. Pulling his hands away, he saw there the mother’s mad, grasping claws.

“I know where we should go,” Lacey said, and pointed east toward a horizon of sloping hills.

The sky had turned gray and the air cloyingly damp. It would rain soon, and wash the blood from the expressway. Brautigan forced his focus from the ruddy asphalt to the hills and said, “Where?”

“It’s the hospital where I was. Last year.”

“No, I said hospitals are no good.”

“It’s not that kind of hospital.” Lacey lowered her eyes . “I had a breakdown. I spent two months there.”

“Months… why? Drugs?” He immediately regretted saying it.

She glared at him. “No, not fucking drugs. I just lost it. I was fucking miserable.”

“I never knew. Your mother never told me.”

“I didn’t want her to.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not any of your business.” She stopped there on the roadside and shouted over the crackling of flames. “I’m not your business. You shouldn’t have come here! You unloaded me eleven years ago, remember? What brought you back? Ditching the wife and kid didn’t turn you into a rock star?” She spat at his feet and started off at a brisk pace. “You know what, Dad? Fuck you! Just go save yourself like you always do!”

“I know I can’t fix anything!” Brautigan yelled after her. “I can’t go back, I know…”

She turned and stared icily at him. “You were going to get up on stage with me, weren’t you? In front of everyone. Fucking coward.”

He stood there and watched her walk away; gave her a generous berth before starting after her. She glanced back a few times, but didn’t say anything else. Kept up her pace, arms swinging. Pulled off her boots and hurled them skyward and then went off-road into the grass. He followed suit. The rain began to come down.

She pulled away when his jacket fell over her shoulders, but didn’t shrug it off entirely, and said nothing as he adjusted it. “Where are we going?” he asked quietly.

Her hair was dark red now, plastered to her face like blood. Despite that, he thought he probably looked worse. “Gallows Hill,” she said. “Doctor Lundgren.”

“She took care of you?”

“He — and he did. I still see him from time to time. He might even know what’s going on.”

Brautigan doubted that, but said nothing.

Gallows Hill was a Victorian manse rising from a wooded summit. Rain ran down the barred windows and cobbled walkways to the gate, where a guard stood with shoulders slumped. Brautigan offered a wave. “We’re here to see Doctor Lundgren.”

“I know him,” Lacey said, and called, “Marc?”

The guard didn’t move. As they drew closer, they saw why. He had wrapped an extension cord around his neck and tied it off at the top of the gate. His face was blue and bloated. Brautigan placed a hand of Lacey’s shoulder, but she only said, “That’s not Marc.”

The gate swung open without resistance. They walked to the entrance and pushed open the double doors.

The interior had a more modern feel, despite the fact that the lights were out, and everything was cloistered in shadow. Brautigan’s socked feet slapped against the tile floor of the lobby. “Anyone here?”

“Lacey?” A haggard-looking man in a white coat emerged from the darkness. He was about Brautigan’s age, and kneaded his hands as he slowly crossed the room. “What brought you here?”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” Lacey said.

Doctor Lundgren nodded. “We went into lockdown two days ago. Patients were throwing themselves at the windows, beating their heads against the walls… then the staff as well.” He mopped sweat from his brow with a kerchief. “Those who are still alive are under restraint. But they won’t eat.”

He glanced past them, through the open doors and the storm, and frowned at the dead guard. “He was thirty.”

“What?” Brautigan’s heart leapt into his throat.

“It’s happening to older people now,” Lundgren muttered.

“Why?” Lacey asked. And Lundgren actually had an answer.

“The only thing I can think of—although it doesn’t entirely bear out under scrutiny—is a dormant gene. Activated first in pubescent youths, which has somehow triggered a systemic response in older generations. I’m still trying to work out the mechanics of it.” He wiped his forehead again. “But I can almost certainly tell you why it’s happening now.”

This time it was Brautigan who pressed him .”Why?”

“I’ve studied the human condition my entire adult life,” Lundgren said. His hands went back to kneading one another. “We’re the most evolved, the most aware—and the most irrational, the most self-destructive. I’m hardly the first to point that out, but few have advanced the theory that we’ve hit an evolutionary wall—that Nature, of which we are part, will not only turn in on and consume us, but cause us to consume ourselves.” He looked hard at Brautigan. “Do you understand? I don’t mean that the external, Mother Earth, is attacking us. Our own genes are rebelling against the mind, the ego, some might even call it the soul.

“Come with me,” the doctor said then, and led them through a door into a long hallway. It was lined with doors containing caged portholes, and Lundgren glanced through each as he led Lacey and Brautigan deeper into darkness.

“Oh, God! Mister Gray!” Lundgren fumbled through a collection of keys and unlocked one of the doors. Brautigan stepped into the room after him and saw that it was padded floor to ceiling—and that the straitjacketed patient within had crammed his head into the corner and suffocated himself.

“How old was he?” Brautigan cried. “How old?”

“Fifty-two,” Lundgren breathed. “I don’t know, he might have done it on his own. I don’t know…” He stared oddly at Lacey. “Doctor Wolfe.”

The girl gasped. Brautigan whirled and saw her in the grip of a female doctor, who had planted a hypo in the base of Lacey’s neck.

The world fell into slow motion. Brautigan started forward, throwing his hands out. Lundgren caught one. The other closed into a fist, and Brautigan spun to throw all his weight into Lundgren’s jaw; but then the needle struck his neck and warmth radiated through his head. He stumbled sideways, hit the padded wall, rebounded and collapsed at Mister Gray’s feet. “Lacey!” he groaned. Her name echoed through his head, then receded into darkness.

“Do you want to see her?”

He was vaguely aware of having been conscious, and in conversation—then Lundgren’s face came into focus. Brautigan tried to say something, but it only came out as a low growl.

“You’re in a straitjacket right now,” the doctor told him calmly. “In a bed next door to your daughter. I’ve taken the same precautions for her. We’re going to get an IV line going to keep each of you nourished. I don’t want to fail Lacey, you understand. I’m taking these measures to keep you both alive.”

Lundgren rummaged through a sheaf of papers lying on Brautigan’s stomach. “You might go through the change at any moment. We’ll observe you both closely—having subjects of your disparate ages, related at that, might lead to a breakthrough.”

He glanced toward a window at the foot of the bed. The sky outside was still a murky gray. “We won’t be observing you, I will be. Doctor Wolfe drowned herself in the shower. I’ve tried to contact the local authorities, but there’s no answer. I don’t know that they could do much better than I, anyway. All I can do is keep you safe while I look for answers.”

Brautigan worked his tongue around his mouth, trying to moisten it so he could speak. Once again he was lost in a haze. All he could manage to grumble was, “Lacey.”

“Yes, I’ll take you to her,” Lundgren said. “Of course.” He got up and walked out of the room.

“LUNDGREN!” Brautigan screamed. No reply.

Tears rolled down the sides of Brautigan’s face. He tried to thrash his limbs, to toss his head, but he could do nothing but weep. He cried Lacey’s name. There was no response from her, either. Maybe the doctor had lied. Maybe he was alone in here.

But was Lundgren right? Would, eventually, inevitably, the suicidal urge take hold of him? And would being strapped down in this bed drive him madder still?

Lundgren came back in. He had a pair of syringes in his hand, a small bottle tucked into the crook of his arm.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the needles. Slowly, methodically, he stabbed one into one of the tiny bottles and began to fill it with a urine-colored fluid.

“What…” Brautigan pleaded.

“It’s not for you,” Lundgren said. He lifted the hypo to his eyes and studied the poison inside. Then he looked at Brautigan. “It’s not bad. I’m not afraid. I almost don’t remember what it was like before… it’s like waking up.”

The doctor and Brautigan both glanced down. Lundgren had begun sawing at his wrist with the needle. He watched idly as crimson spread along the hem of his coat. “Hmm.” Then he inserted the needle into his forearm.

“Where is my daughter?” Brautigan sobbed.

Lundgren sat erect, and for a second Brautigan thought, hoped, prayed that the man was lucid—but he was dead, and he slipped off the bed and onto the floor.

The room was quiet. The world was quiet.

Brautigan didn’t want to cry any more.

He only wanted to die.