Status: This is only the beginning

Ohio's on Fire

The Girl

It was with an irregular heartbeat and sweaty palms that Austin Carlile waited inside the sterile hospital room for his doctor. The room itself was nerve-racking enough, being that it was a small, crammed square space with barely enough room for the patient bench, supply cabinet and fake plant in the corner for decoration. It didn’t have any windows; just a large artist’s rendition of an ocean view stretching nearly half of the wall beside him. Austin supposed it was meant to be an uplifting piece of décor; symbolizing freedom and hope or some shit like that, but its home against the blank hospital wall was almost ironic. People didn’t normally receive hopeful or uplifting news after they’d been summoned to fly two thousand miles across the country to a hospital.

Austin could still hear the remorseful tone of Dr. Malcolm’s voice ringing in his ears from the phone call two nights prior.

“We…well, we missed something…we need you to come in as soon as you can.”

Of course he knew this had something to do with his disease, but Austin was still confused. He hadn’t been having any trouble thanks to his daily heart medication, so why had he been called all the way back to Ohio for an in-person consultation?

Like his late mother, Austin had been diagnosed several years ago with a genetic disorder that affects connective tissues of the body. While Marfan’s Syndrome gave him his towering height and somewhat lanky stature, it also gave him one very major heart defect—one he’d been told was treatable with medication.

Austin jumped to his feet at the sound of the door handle turning. Seconds later a young man stepped into the room that looked like he could have been Doogie Howser’s Asian brother. Doctor Kirk Malcolm was one of the East coast’s leading cardiologists, and quite possibly the youngest on record. He was brilliant, of course, but his almost childlike appearance was always a bit unnerving for Austin and he couldn’t help but feel the urge to I.D. him or something.

“Hey dude, how are you feeling today?”

Austin was always surprised at the way his doctor spoke, even though he knew fully well that Malcolm’s parents had been from Jersey and not directly off some boat. He likened hearing the Americanized slang from the Asian man to a cat barking.
Dr. Malcolm also wasn’t one for formality. He took a seat in the small black swivel chair beside the storage cabinet and motioned for Austin to sit back down on the paper-lined patient bench.

The casualness in his doctor’s tone should have put Austin a little more at ease but it didn’t. “Doc, what’s going on? No one has been able to tell me anything, not even Roldie.”

A smile twitched the corner of Dr. Malcolm’s mouth at the mention of his fellow doctor’s nickname but was gone as soon as it had appeared. “Ah, yes,” he sighed, adapting a more serious tone. He had brought a manila file folder in the room with him that had to have been several inches thick and started flicking through Austin’s file as he spoke, “As this was entirely my fault, I haven’t told Harold just yet. I didn’t want to run the risk of him or someone else telling you before I got the chance to.”

Something pulled at Austin’s gut and he felt his heart rate increase. He couldn’t read Malcolm’s expression and that really worried him; neither happy nor sad nor remorseful or unrepentant. He almost looked bored. What was this mistake that was so urgent it required his immediate appearance? Dr. Malcolm had said over the phone that he had missed something, what did that mean? How does a doctor just “miss something”? The worst case scenarios were reeling though Austin’s mind.

The worry was apparently obvious on his face because Malcolm spoke up again. This time Austin could see the hesitation on his doctor’s face. “Remember how we talked about the possibility of you having to undergo surgery?” Upon asking the question, Dr. Malcolm extracted a large copy of an x-ray from his file. “This is your heart, Austin,” he indicated to the black and white picture, as if that much wasn’t already obvious. “And this,” he pointed a finger to a spot almost in the center, “this is what Marfan’s has done to it.”

The x-ray in front of Austin made his jaw drop. It looked as if someone had reached inside his chest and pinched the aorta. Knowing fully well that the inside of a healthy heart didn’t look anything like this, Austin could only stare worriedly from the picture to his doctor.

“I miscalculated your disease’s progression, Austin, and I’m truly sorry for that.”

Austin gulped and after a long pause finally managed to choke out the most pressing question on his mind. “How…how much time do I have left?”

Dr. Malcolm’s expression changed from somber to excited in about two seconds flat. At seemingly the most inopportune of times, the doctor laughed. “Oh, you’re not going to die!” he chuckled hurriedly. Austin was missing the hilarity in this situation and could only stare at him bewilderedly. “It just means you’ll need to have open heart surgery to get a replacement valve put in. The surgery’s a walk in the park; I’ve done it a hundred times already, so the risks are very minimal.”

Austin was still in a state of shock. He’d been led to believe his time living was about to be cut short and now his doctor was laughing at him. He may have been brilliant, but Doogie Chang seriously needed to work on his bedside manner.

_____________________

Standing on the edge of complete and utter destruction, Austin Carlile almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A raging fire and the sea of cars caught in its path held his brown eyes fixated on the scene. No one was outside of their vehicles. The screaming had stopped. He was alone. Clenching his eyes shut, Austin couldn’t help but wonder why bad things always seemed to happen when he came to Ohio.

The fire wasn’t even close to burning out but Austin let his feet carry him towards it anyway. He felt numb, robotic, but started looking through car windows in some hope he wasn’t the only one left. When he stumbled up to a maroon colored minivan he was thankful that there wasn’t anything left in his stomach to throw up. A mother was in the front seat, her head turned at a grotesque angle towards the window with unseeing eyes still open. Behind her, three small children were tangled in a bloody mess on the backseat. Austin put a hand on the side of the vehicle to steady himself while he dry-heaved.

After coughing several times he looked up across the destruction. “Hello!” he called desperately. The noise of car alarms and the crackling fire all but swallowed his voice. “Can anyone hear me? Please! Hello? Is anyone still alive?”

With no response, Austin started moving faster. He made quick work weaving between cars, peering in windows at more grisly scenes. One couple had actually made it out of their vehicle but their bodies were charred beyond recognition, laid out across the pavement. Austin shuddered at the thought of the couple running around frantically as they were being burned alive. There were others who had suffered similar fates, as well as some worse. He saw a man impaled to his driver’s seat by a long piece of twisted metal with half of his face completely burned away.

With each passing minute Austin grew closer to giving up. His pace slowed as he wandered between cars. He was walking by two teenage kids with their brains across the asphalt when something caught his eye. Sandwiched between a dusty old pickup truck and an overturned sedan was a sleek black coupe with tinted windows. Austin didn’t recognize the maker but it was definitely foreign made judging by the body style and the way it screamed expensive. It almost hurt Austin to see such a pretty car in a state like that.

Moving closer, he circled to the front and saw the windshield of the coupe had been almost completely shattered out. The engine of the truck beside it had smoke billowing from beneath its hood and small flames were licking around the edges. The realization that he was standing mere feet from a potentially explosive truck engine suddenly hit Austin and he jumped back. He was turning to run when a gap in the smoke gave Austin a brief glimpse of the driver’s seat of the pretty black car, and the young woman inside it.

Austin felt his heart give an involuntary lurch when his eyes locked on a pair of striking green ones—and live ones at that. They belonged to a young woman with short brown hair and a frustrated expression on her thin face. While most would appear somewhat relieved to see someone able to help standing outside, she appeared to be annoyed with the situation. Not giving him a second glance, she turned her head and started pulling furiously at something on her right side. Austin squinted his eyes and saw the strap of her seatbelt still over her chest. Deducing that something was preventing her from getting it off, he watched her struggle with the belt for a few moments before she looked up at him again.

“Hey, asshole!” she yelled. The sudden eye contact and the intensity of her voice made Austin jump slightly. “Are you going to come help me, or what?”

For someone appearing to be so helpless, he thought she might have asked him a little nicer than that. Then again, he had been gawking at her rather rudely moments ago. Pushing thoughts of the flaming truck engine to the side, Austin hurried to the hood of the black car.

“The belt is jammed,” she yelled over the noise of her car’s alarm.

Austin climbed over the hood of the car and immediately noticed that the white oxford shirt she was wearing was completely soaked in blood on the right side. “You’re bleeding…” he trailed off with wide eyes. He didn’t know if it was the trauma of the accident or alcohol keeping him in his dazed state but he couldn’t help but stare at the woman.

She was undeniably beautiful, and her petite frame looked even more delicate amongst the wreckage. A thin cut on her face stretched from her right temple to her jaw and it gently oozed more blood down her sun-tanned skin. Through the blood and soot from the smoke he could see a faint pattern of freckles across her nose and beneath her coal-lined eyes. The sight reminded him of a phoenix, the mythological bird with the ability to rise from its own ashes.

“Flesh wound,” she dismissed his concern immediately, bringing his thoughts back to her situation. “Come on, do you have a knife or anything?”

Knowing fully that his pocket knife was still back on the tour bus with the rest of his belongings, Austin looked around hurriedly for something he could use to cut her free. A large shard of windshield glass on the passenger’s seat beside her caught his eye first. He reached to grab it with shaky hands.

She eyed him nervously but nodded her head, knowing that they didn’t have much time to waste. The shard of glass began to feel white hot against his palm as Austin started furiously sawing away at her belt. Ignoring the pain of the glass biting into his skin, he quickened his pace.

With one agonizing drag, the belt snapped loose and Austin immediately tossed the piece of blood-stained glass to the side. “Fuck,” he cursed, clenching his fist shut. He held his good hand down the woman to help her out onto the hood of the car. She seized it immediately and they both felt their stomachs plummet at the sound the truck engine beside them was making. It was that same high-pitched whistle a firework makes when it’s being launched into the air. The truck engine was about to blow.

Not daring to look back, the pair leapt off the car and broke into a dead sprint. Seconds later, they were both knocked off their feet and onto the hot asphalt from the explosion. Austin covered his head and braced himself for the worst. The clang of metal pieces falling around them stopped after a moment and he slowly raised his head from the ground. Beside him, the young woman was doing the same, and even starting to push herself up.

Once on his feet again, Austin looked at the flaming remains of both the truck and the young woman’s car. Any later and that could have easily been him. A nervous sort of chuckle involuntarily escaped his lips, followed shortly by an actual laugh. He glanced at the woman standing beside him with a sideways smile.

“Whew,” he sighed. Glad to see that she too had a relived smile on her face and wasn’t seriously injured, he felt it was okay to laugh a little. “That was a close one.”

Aside from his hand, Austin didn’t have too many injuries and he put his good hand on his knee to catch his breath. When he straightened up again, he was met with a sight that he only thought possible in his nightmares, or horror films. Less than a hundred yards away, a man in tattered and blood-splattered clothes was crouched over the body of a small child. He was pulling what appeared to be red rope from her stomach and stuffing it furiously into his mouth. Slack-jawed, Austin could only stare in horror as the man continued to devour the little girl’s intestines, slurping and spraying blood all over as if he were eating spaghetti.

Austin’s stomach lurched and he held a hand over his mouth while he gagged. To his utter horror, the man suddenly jerked his head up and locked eyes with him. There was a moment of eerie silence as he tilted his head to the side slowly and swallowed. But in a split second, his bloody lips pulled back into a maniacal grin and he sprang forward from his crouch. Fear had Austin rooted to the spot and he had only seconds to register that the man was coming straight for him on all fours and snarling like a rabid dog.

The monster was closing in fast and much to Austin’s alarm, the young woman suddenly stepped in front of him. In the blink of an eye, she pulled a handgun from the small of her back and stretched her arm out. The first shot caught the monster dead in the face and he was knocked backwards onto the pavement. She let fly three more rounds into it before she lowered the smoking gun to her side. It lay motionless in a bloody heap on the ground and Austin could only stare between the two in disbelief.

When she turned to face him again, she had the same annoyed expression on her face as she did back in the car. She appeared to be completely un-phased by the fact she’d just gunned down a flesh-eating monster quite literally twice her size. In fact, she looked almost bored. Sighing, she tucked the gun back into the waistband of her black pants as she walked straight up to him. Before Austin could even process what was happening, she raised a clenched fist and punched him square in the face. The force was enough to send him straight for the ground. His vision blurred for a moment, making his world spin before he completely blacked out.

The lone conscious person amongst the destruction; Gwen Tyler withdrew a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her pocket. After taking a long satisfying drag on the menthol stick moments later, she exhaled heavily and reached in her other pocket for her cell phone. “Yeah, it’s Tyler,” she snapped irritably into the phone the second someone picked up. “Tell Doctor Malcolm that one of his fucked up science experiments caused a pile-up on I-71 just now.” She paused for a moment and looked down at the tattooed unconscious man lying at her feet. “No, I have a better idea. Send out a clean-up crew and secure the area. We’ve got work to do.”
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