“How about I suck your cock?”
“No,” I said. I was holding a clipboard, my other hand braced against steel shelving.
Jillian leaned forward and breathed on my neck. It was a thing she had always done and it drove me wild. Her lips might graze my skin when she did that, but for the most part it was her breath, soft and hot and immediate.
“Come on, Louis,” she whispered, her voice as soft as her breath on my neck. “Let me get your motor running. Then you can go for a ride.”
The tone of her voice and the look on her face got to me. “Well,” I said, getting as hard as a rock as she gave me her lopsided grin and got down on her knees. “Okay.”
She unzipped my fly, reached into my pants for my cock, and then laughed. I was so hard she couldn’t get me out of my pants, so she loosened my belt and pulled my pants down. I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Underwear was just one more thing to wash, and we had to wash most things by hand since the power went out; the generators were put to more important needs, like heat and light.
“Mmmm,” she said. Her tongue flicked over the head of my cock and I felt that familiar and always-fresh jolt of sexual electricity race across my skin. I nearly dropped the clipboard and grabbed the steel shelf to steady myself.
My left hand slipped in something, and the very last shred of my consciousness that hadn’t been pumped into my prick wondered about the slick substance on my fingers.
I looked down at Jilly, she was right, I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck… and I glanced at my hand.
I had a handful of vibrant green snot.
I saw my first grin on the Golden Gate Bridge. How picturesque. Jillian and I had been living in Pacific Heights for 15 years when the outbreak happened. While people were dying in other parts of America and the world at large, my wife and I were taking a Sunday stroll. We’ll never know why the government kept things under wraps for so long. They didn’t get first responders like Jillian involved until there were confirmed outbreaks of the smiler sickness from coast to coast, and by then it was far too late to do anything.
We had taken Friday off, meaning Jillian stayed home from the office and I stayed away from the laptop and my stories. The plan was to enjoy a three-day staycation, a short vacation at home. We didn’t even leave the house until Sunday morning. We ordered in pizza and Chinese food, and watched old movies and bullshit reality TV. She didn’t see or hear any breaking news. Bad shit was part of Jillian’s job, and being on vacation, she wanted to avoid any news. Besides, she had her Blackberry. If anything did happen, the office could reach her. I peeked at the headlines on Google News from time to time, but it was all the same old stuff. We made love, too. Not as much as we did when we were younger, but enough. I’m not telling you that so you’ll think I’m some kind of stud who was banging his wife at every opportunity. I’m mentioning it because it was the last time things were ever the way they were.
While we were enjoying each other’s company, the smiler sickness had come to San Francisco. It spread fast, by grin attacks—primary transmission, accidental contact with body fluids—secondary transmission, and by flies—tertiary transmission. I’ll say more about that later. By the time Jillian and I drove out to the bridge for our late morning walk, the city basking under a summer sun was doomed. We had no idea. Our walk must have taken place during a lull in the violence that is so much a part of the smiler sickness. To us, everything seemed normal.
Jillian loved the bridge. It was a long walk from one side to the other and back again, but the ocean air was always bracing and the views of the Pacific on one side and San Francisco, the bay and Marin County on the other were incredible when they weren’t completely obscured by the fog.
The grin was a man with a military buzz cut. He was wearing sneakers, blue jeans and a t-shirt. I assume he had lost part of his right arm, in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s no way to know now, and he had a prosthetic two-pronged hook held in place by straps over each shoulder.
We first saw him at a distance. He would approach tourists or locals on the east sidewalk, the city-facing bridge walkway, and they would shy away from him. I assumed he was a bum who had strayed from downtown, begging for spare change in the most unlikely place. As he got closer, I got a better look at him and began to feel uneasy.
His skin was discolored; scratched and streaked with blood in some places, nearly gray in others. I didn’t know then that the parasites, now identified as giardia motivus, carried a number of diseases, including one that caused a condition similar to mange. The skin of the infected became inflamed and itched furiously as it died. His hair had fallen out in patches and he had scratched at his scalp until it was raw and red.
There was a thick flow of bright green snot on his lips and chin, another sign of the parasite; his immune system was in overdrive in a futile fight against the smiling sickness.
He was grinning like a lunatic, the symptomatic rictus making him smile so wide it had to have hurt, and he was gnashing his teeth and snapping his jaws as if biting at the air. There was a terrible gaping wound on the side of his throat. Only later would I think back and realize he must have caught the sickness after having been attacked by another grin.
I took Jillian’s arm and turned her around, heading back the way we had come.
She didn’t say anything. Her face was pale. She had seen the man too.
It was then that I recalled stories I had seen online over the weekend, stories about a mystery illness appearing across the country. The stories were on blogs, and were discounted by all of the legitimate news sources which quoted government officials who insisted nothing was wrong and said there was no need for the media to spread unnecessary fear and unrest as they had done in the past with SARs and avian flu.
A woman screamed behind us and we walked faster.
Not fast enough.
We were passing the south tower of the bridge when I heard sneakers slapping the concrete behind me. I turned and saw the man rushing at me and shoved Jillian aside.
He slammed into me so hard he knocked me flat and kept going, stumbling over me. He stopped, shook his head, and turned around just as I was getting to my feet. He rushed at me again. His manic grin was horrifying. He swung his hooked prosthesis at my face and I felt it catch in my cheek and then tear a channel through flesh and muscle from my left ear to the corner of my mouth where it ripped free. I cried out in pain and shoved him away. He lunged at me once more.
I’m no hero. As he threw himself at me I was so frightened I ducked down, wanting to curl into a ball, my back against the bridge railing. He leaped forward as I dropped down out of his way. He went over me, over the railing. And down into the bay.
I got to my feet, feeling light-headed. My shirt was soaked with my own blood and the side of my face was numb.
Jillian was already calling 911 on her mobile. When she saw my face she said, “Oh baby, I can see your teeth.” I reached up to touch my left cheek. She was right. My cheek was gone, the skin and muscle pulled back to expose my teeth and gums on that side. Jillian had blood spatter on her. My blood. Jesus.
“No answer,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt. The barrier between the sidewalk and the nearest traffic lane was harder to climb than the railing that so many suicides went over. Jillian scrambled over it and tried to flag down passing cars. No luck. People saw a bit of blood on her and my ruined face and they floored it.
Jillian came back to the sidewalk and took off her shirt. She was wearing a cute bra. It was powder blue with a tiny lace fringe, and she was filling those cups to the brim. Funny, the things you remember. I was looking at her breasts and thinking how lucky I was to have a woman with a body like that in my life when she folded her shirt into a compress and held it against my face.