Black Flies

Morning broke on the sixth day since the last burning, and I remained unconvinced of Matthew’s innocence. I don’t know what made me disbelieve him so, and it tore at me, a mortal Prometheus chained to the edge of place I called home, heart and soul picked over by the black flies that carried pestilence on their breaths.

I woke before the breaking.

I did not disturb Matthew when I rose. He had realized that the one thing as potent as alcohol was passion, and I had taken the bait in my hand and had welcomed that drunken synergy with appalling ease. I’d thought of salvation; I’d thought of it as a simple thing, with a haze as thick in my mind as the fog that hung over my beloved waves.

I lit a single candle and carried it with me to the island in the kitchen, where a bottle of vodka lay on its side, dripping its life away. A light on the horizon hinted at the coming dawn. For the first time in years, I felt the morning and the sleeplessness of the prior night in fresh black hollows beneath my eyes. I went through bottle after bottle of water, but the dark would not leave.

When a light through the kitchen window became a line on the haze, I left the candle burning atop my two-day-old painting, just between the subject’s clear blue eyes. It was only after this that I resolved to rejoin the breathing version of said subject, settling myself amidst the rumpled sheets like a ship in a storm. The cotton felt harsh against my bare flesh.

Matthew stirred.

I felt like I was hurtling toward something cataclysmic yet inevitable, a comet caught in the pull of a far greater celestial body. Inevitable, I wondered, really and truly? I could stop, theoretically. I could return to the state I’d been in less than five days ago, happy, blissful, even, and ultimately oblivious.

No. The current had me, and I would not fight it. I’d always thought of the bridgeburners of the early plague days as manic and irrational, their panic leading to the destruction of our only outlet to the rest of the world—a world that may or may have existed by the time I’d ridden the old black bike home with a corpse in the trailer—but I felt it, then—that need for action, as well as that driving curiosity that I was always told would be the death of me—as rays of sunlight finally cut through the haze outside our window.

The air smelled staunchly of sweat and ocean and vaguely of dry wine. I rested my hand on Matthew’s shoulder, bracing against him to lean forward so that my lips almost touched his ear when I spoke.

“You’re holding back, Matthew.” My voice was low but devoid of malice. His eyes remained closed, but a shift in his breathing told me that he was awake.

He didn’t shift or turn; he didn’t even open his eyes. “Forget this, Ambros.”

“Is the truth so harsh?”

“No.”

“Then tell me. I saw you with the rosary. It ate at you.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Then tell me,” I repeated. “Let’s mend this.”

“I don’t know that it will. I—I didn’t ask forgiveness for what I’ve done.” His eyes were open now, but slitted, twin lakes against rose white, an inversion of the morning’s sunrise. Still, he doesn’t look at me. “I...saved us. I saved you.”

“How?”

He sighted, and it took him a moment to dredge up the word. “Immunity.”

“There was a vaccine?”

“No. At least, not one that would’ve taken fewer than three years to make. By then...well, you saw. It was more of a battery of immunizations. Boosters…I gave them to myself, too.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“No.” He rolled his shoulder, shrugging my hand off of it. “No. It was in pill form, like the Typhoid boosters used to be. Several rounds, and you couldn’t taste…if you ground up the pills and mixed it into a cup of good ol’ Gulf sweet tea.”

I fell back, onto the bed, hope springing into my chest. “That’s all?”

“You know damn well it’s not.”

Of course. “Then tell me.”

He didn’t speak. The waves roared in the background, the threat of rain pungent in the air, humidity swelling like a wave about to crash forward.

“You call it the pestilence. I liked the words you used to use when you wrote. The Rapture, you said. But look.” He tilted his chin up, gesturing toward the oceanfront, where gulls and other birds squabbled and screamed. “Does that look like the end?”

The sea batted against the shore, erratic, having lost its pulse. I watched it in silence, a silence so deep that I could hear our joint breathing—except, the unity had become unhinged.

I didn’t need him to say it; he already had. He’d said it as soon as he’d said, I saved you. It felt like the time I’d gotten caught under the edge of a barrel wave, the type wave that broke in a hollow roll around me. Of course, I’d threaded through such waves before, but this time left me crashing against an outcropping of rocks, an experience that had left me with five stitches and the accompanying embarrassing story.

Immunity. The rocks had—literally—appeared out of the blue. Black flies in a swirl of swells.

You can’t immunize yourself against something that you don’t know exists.

Words failed me.

Matthew roll over, facing me. “It’s not. But you’re afraid to admit it.”

“People…died.”

“They would have died anyway. We were reaching the end. It was a mercy kill, love.”

“...no.” There was a question I wanted to ask, and I hated myself for it. Matthew saw it in my carefully averted eyes. Love. The word taunted me, haunted me, burrowed under my skin.

He echoed my thoughts: “How?”

I didn’t reply, not caring to admit my guilt.

“How?” he repeated. “Genetic engineering, that’s how. I lied about the paperwork, yes. I had free reign in the lab, passed the disease off as something I’d extracted from a dead fish. It can’t transfer between species, but they were dead before they realized it…the flies carried it; they were modified, too, so that they could transfer the virus to their offspring. Silly lab techs, letting the flies get at the the samples.” He smiled wanly, nostalgically. “It was beautiful.”

My voice was hoarse. “Why did you ask for forgiveness if you do not regret it?”

The smile collapsed in on itself, and I couldn’t read the storm that danced across his features like candlelight through a hazy corridor. “Sometimes I catch myself thinking that I should. I don’t. I won’t. Can all souls be saved? I asked you that, and it wasn’t for myself.” He rubbed his fingers together, deftly searching for beads that weren’t there. “Surely, some among the pure were.”

The sun disappeared in a sheet of rain over the ocean, a long cloud engulfing the horizon. My mind struggled to make sense of his words. “Why did you never tell me this?”

“I was afraid that you wouldn’t understand.” He looked up at me imploringly, a golden-haired child sitting the front pew during mass. “But you do. I see it in your eyes, you do. You do. It wasn’t the end. And you and I, we’ll be together and we very well may be among the last. I saved you, Ambros, because I knew that you, among everyone else, would understand.”

No, said the waves, agents of endless creation and destruction. No, no, no…

My head broke the surface. My lungs found air, fresh and crisp and new, the black rocks receding into the distance. Clarity engulfed me.

I settled back into the bed and I cupped his face in my hands. A brackish wind blew the first of the rain in through our window, spotting Matthew’s face and forming rivulets as the droplets joined the tears that had appeared just seconds before.

“Yes,” I said, my forehead to his, the rain darkening the sheets around us. “I understand.”