The smell is the first thing to hit me, followed by the sight of bodies stacked as high as the eye can see. I shouldn’t be able to smell anything in this state and I for damn sure shouldn’t be able to handle such a smell without gagging. That means I’m being allowed to experience the stench of death and decay without becoming overpowered. Unlike me, the living walk around in those yellow containment suits you see in movies when there’s been some type of outbreak.
Somewhere not too far away, somebody cries. It is impossible to tell the sex or age of the person because the despair they express transcends any of that. The grief stretches throughout the street as refrigerated trucks are loaded with body after body. The loaders aren’t even using gurneys, they’re just grabbing the dead people from both ends and tossing them inside the truck into the storage beds like sacks of wheat.
Someone yells, “Christ, Craig! This one’s still alive!”
I can’t see who said this or who they are talking about, but the flurry of activity points to one of the trucks further down the line.
“What the fuck, Craig?” a female voice says. “How many times do I need to tell you to check them before you shuck them?”
Craig utters a sheepish, “Sorry.”
That’s the last thing I hear before the scene shifts to what appears to be the outside of a hospital where, if I’m not mistaken, a group of angry people are brandishing protest signs and yelling at medical staff. What could these people have possibly done to incur such rage?
“Fucking crisis actor!” the big guy in the red baseball cap nearest me says, spit flying from his mouth.
The woman in scrubs standing like a statue before him wears a surgical mask and says nothing as he keeps accusing her of lying to the American people and calling her a pedophile.
Where the hell did that come from?
None of the medical folks are reacting to the angry men screaming in their faces like demented toddlers. It’s probably the bravest thing I’ve ever seen, except I don’t know what the hell is going on.
Where is my guide? I don’t care how hideous it is, I would welcome its presence right now. It would be far less nightmarish than what I’m witnessing from my fellow human beings.
I decide to walk on, past the unmoving medical staff, past the angry, mostly unmasked protestors, past the news crews who are obviously eating all this shit up. I need sanity, peace, something that makes sense. I find the exact opposite on the next block.
Pamphlet-waving, saliva-spewing men and women beckoning all of us who pass by to come hear what they have to say. Most of them want us to sign their petitions for this group or against that group or for no group at all. They have markedly different beliefs but they all somehow sound the same. This whole scene feels less like reality and more like metaphor, but there’s a gritty realism to the whole affair that stubbornly keeps me from dismissing it as such.
Ignoring the shouting would-be activists, I glance to my right and stop dead in my tracks. On the side of an abandoned brick building, somebody has painted, in giant red letters: THE MAYANS WERE WRONG!
It’s all too much. I don’t feel myself hit anything when I pass out, but everything goes black
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