“Apply firm pressure,” she said. “You’re bleeding a lot and we have a long walk ahead.” Our car was parked at the south end of the bridge.
As we got closer to the end of the bridge we could hear distant noises, from nearby neighborhoods. Sirens. Screams. Tiny pops that might have been gunshots.
We reached the car. Jillian put me in the back seat. I stretched out as much as I could and put my head down. She started driving. I closed my eyes. It sounded like there was a war going on out there but all I cared about was my torn face, and the pain.
I heard brakes screech and a bang like a hammer hitting sheet metal. My body shifted and the back of my head hit the side of the car.
When I opened my eyes again, it was night.
Jillian was gone.
I got out of the car. My legs were weak and I was shaking.
We had reached the corner of Lombard and Gough, in Cow Hollow, when a cab had t-boned us. There were shards of glass and plastic everywhere. I could hear sirens and saw helicopters hovering over the city to the west and the south.
Home wasn’t far. I started walking.
I have the vaguest memories of pushing through the front door of our building, almost crawling up the stairs, and falling through the door to our condo.
One of the bedroom windows was open and a lovely breeze filled the room. I fell onto the bed. My face was bleeding again. I thought about trying to clean and bandage my wound, trying to call for help, but I drifted away.
The last thing I remember is hearing a fly buzzing over the bed.
It was three days before Jillian found me. The bed was a mess. So was I. My bowels and bladder had let go. My clothes and the sheets were soaked with sweat. I woke up to hear Jillian screaming. She thought I was dead. When I opened my eyes she screamed even louder and began brushing at my face with trembling hands.
I was dehydrated and weak and she had to help me walk to the bathroom. She spent a lot of time delicately wiping my face with a washcloth. I didn’t know what she was doing until I looked down and saw maggots squirming on the floor tiles.
The fly in the bedroom had laid eggs in my wound. The larvae had been eating my putrefying flesh when Jillian arrived.
She eased me into a warm bath and washed me, giving me small sips of bottled water.
The soap stung in my wound, but not as much as I thought it would.
We put two and two together later. Without any medical aid my wound would have become infected. I could have died. The maggots saved my life. They ate away the diseased flesh. I had a hole in my left cheek with the circumference of a beer can, but the edges of the wound were already healing. When I smiled, I showed teeth, bone and muscle all the way to my left ear.
After the accident, Jillian had been taken to the hospital by the cab driver who assumed I was dead. She had been held at the California Pacific Medical Center for observation. Anyone who went to a hospital was held for observation for forty-eight hours. She said Pacific Heights was now a ghost town.
A contagion had spread from coast to coast. The infected became deranged, violent. A telltale sign of the infection was a manic grin as the muscles of the face tightened and contracted. Most of San Francisco had been evacuated by the California Army National Guard, but there were holdouts; Armed soldiers were reluctant to enter the crime-ridden Bayview-Hunters Point area, the Tenderloin and Nob Hill were lost to rampaging infected hordes, and there was some sort of three-way skirmish going on in the parklands of the Presidio between the infected, military and police forces, and an armed band of men and woman calling themselves the Defenders of the Pacific Republic. Elsewhere in the city the authorities had already given up trying to contain and treat the infected and were shooting them on sight.
The smiling infected, already being referred to as grins or happyfaces, were hard to put down. They were highly resistant to pain and could only be killed with a headshot that destroyed the brain, or multiple wounds that caused a massive bleed-out. This of course heightened the hysteria. Talk of zombies could not be quelled by any public servants, including the President, who had pleaded for calm and civil order until televisions were showing nothing but local emergency broadcast updates.
By the time I was able to leave our building, four days after Jillian found me and almost a week since the infection reached California, there was nowhere to go. The power was out, and so was our cable service. Our internet was out as well; we got both services from Comcast. There wasn’t much on the radio. Two very faint broadcasts that must have come from pirate radio stations told us to either embrace the infected and work with them toward a common understanding, or to shoot the grinning plague-bearers, fuckin chinks, looting niggers, peace-loving faggots, fascist cops, chickenshit Mexicans, and all the goddamned Democrats. Someone was still broadcasting from the KCBS studios on Battery Street.
The peninsula that is San Francisco and San Mateo counties is like the fist on the end of an arm thrust out from the California coast and pointing due north. The arm is San Mateo County. The fist is the city and county of San Francisco. On either side of the narrowest part of the peninsula, the wrist, so to speak, are the city of Pacifica on the Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco International Airport on San Francisco Bay. We learned from KCBS that there were fires burning from Pacifica to SFO, a wall of fire ten miles long.
The Golden Gate Bridge was on fire as well. We saw that when we went up on the roof of our building. I couldn’t tell what was burning, the bridge was steel and concrete, but we could see the flames and lots of thick smoke as if the bridge had been piled high with old tires that had been set alight. Beyond that we could see a swath of dark clouds rolling in from the sea and obscuring the stars. The Bay Bridge had been barricaded by the Navy and civilian engineers. Rumor was that the city was going to be carpet-bombed to wipe out the infection when it was realized that geography could help contain the spread of the disease, so the fires were started. The grins couldn’t or wouldn’t swim, and they sure as hell couldn’t walk through fire. They were trapped in the city.
And we were trapped with them.
The frightened young man at KCBS told listeners to, “Get out of the city any way you can. The armed forces are pulling out, and when they are gone, anyone who has survived is on their own. Get out now. As long as the army is here, they are here to help. And whatever you do, don’t smile.”
We decided to walk downtown, to the heart of the city. If there was anyone in authority they would have to be there. A lot of businesses had a lot of money invested in property there; surely that would be worth protecting. And we would be right along the route of retreating soldiers and fleeing civilians heading for the bay and any boats still crossing the water.
We waited until night, hoping it would be safer, each of us carrying a backpack with a few things, a transistor radio, clothes and some food. For the first time in my life I wished I had a gun. Instead, Jillian carried a baseball bat, and I wore a sword off of one hip, in a cheap leather scabbard. I felt ridiculous.
I bought the sword in college because I was young and stupid and thought it was a cool thing to have, and through the years it stayed hidden in boxes of junk in the back of one closet after another. It looked like a Roman gladius. The blade was two feet long, the hilt was old wood, and there was no crossguard. It had been over one hundred and fifty years old when I bought it. There were chips and pits in the blade, and the maker had stamped his mark in the steel, a rose.