'It's sticking to my back, to my skin,' Ayaan announced. There were a lot of people in the tent, suddenly. Her heart pounded fast and then it skipped a beat. Someone shoved a tube up her nose, its tip slick with lubricant. She tried to sneeze and cough and fight but they wouldn't let her. They were so much stronger than she remembered. A woman in a nurse's uniform, complete with a little peaked cap, leaned over her, throwing her into shadow, and jabbed a hypodermic in Ayaan's neck.
'What'what was'what'was'that?' Ayaan demanded. Her arms were quivering, her body shaking. Was it the ice, was she shivering from the cold? She couldn't really feel it any more. She was shaking too much. She was shaking a lot, she was she was convulsing convulsing. 'What did you just give me?' she asked.
The nurse's mouth was a flat line, a slot that ticker tape might come out of. 'Cyanide,' she answered.
Darkness clanged shut across her vision like shutters closing with a sound of ringing, a tinnitus ring.
The sound squealed up to a howling, an echoing scream that might have come from her own throat except except except
time didn't just turn on her it turned a wheel it turned like a wheel
(For a moment she was outside her own body, looking down, pointing at herself. Blood raced through tubes running down her throat, up her ass. A machine like a bagpipe bellowed up and down and breathed for her. There was a man next to her, a very hairy naked white man with blue tattoos curlicuing all over his body. He had a rope around his neck like a punk rock neck tie, or like a noose cut way too short. 'That's me,' she said, 'they're killing me,' and he smiled the way you might smile at a baby who suddenly, as its first words, announced it had filled its diaper. 'I know you, don't I?' she asked.)
a nurse came through the tent, and passed right through him, as if he were a ghost
(Yes,the man told her, without opening his mouth. Her vision went away and instead she saw a brain in a glass jar.I'll be in touch, he told her, and then she was back in her body, in the dark, with that noise.)
the noise stopped
everything
stopped
.
She opened her eyes with a scream.
Ayaan sat up in bed, naked under silk sheets. She was in a small bedroom with a fireplace. A cheerful little blaze danced away at the corner of her vision. Her head felt as if it had been cracked open and stuffed full of scrap metal. She touched her face, felt a cold, rubbery mask there.
She wasn't breathing. She sucked in a deep breath of air and felt no real need to exhale it again. She touched her wrist with two fingers and couldn't find a pulse. She did find a black vein running underneath her grayish brown skin. It was as hard as a length of wire. The blood inside that vein wasn't going anywhere.
She screamed and screamed, shouted and cursed and her throat never got sore. She sobbed, big wracking hard heaves but no tears came.
Nausea surged upward inside of her and she jumped out of the bed, looked around frantically for something to throw up into. Nothing presented itself so she clutched her hands over her mouth and just held on, held on until the need, the desire to vomit went away. It left her feeling drained, depleted and sore.
And then hungry. She could really use a snack, she told herself. She was going to need to keep up her energy reserves for what came next.
What came next? She couldn't remember.
She stood up again. Looked around the room. A faded newspaper clipping was pasted to one wall, a picture of a building by a boardwalk, its windows broken, its paint faded or missing altogether. A place that died even before the world came to an end, according to the text.