Bitter Almonds

Across America long dormant televisions and radios sputter to life as Washington makes their final transmission to the people and soldiers still fighting.

“My... Americans. It is with a heavy heart that I address you today for the last time.”

The television displays a grainy image of the President seated at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Static plagues the screen around her, chewing at her face.

“Our whole nation has …. the onslaught against us. There is no blinking at the fact that our people... our existence is in grave danger. Of course, you know this.” The President stares gravely into the camera, every inch of her umber skin grown pale and thin. “We have fought for so many years and will continue to fight until the plague is defeated or… no other option.”

She pauses, brows furrowing so that the depth of her wrinkles are seen across the country. June can’t help but notice how much they resemble the trenches as she stands among the 250 soldiers of her military bunker, hoping in vain for the end of the war.

“At 0800 hours this morning, Washington was overrun. The soldiers of our brave military fought valiantly and with great sacrifice but there… no recovery. The city is lost… Today, I must ask that you endure. No matter how long it may take our great country to overcome… endeavor towards absolute victory. Place your confidence in our armed... God will not…”

The audio dissolves into static and June is left wondering what God truly would and would not do after everything she’d seen. Then slowly the President stands and the camera crawls backwards to reveal a black revolver resting on the edge of the oak timber desk and a chunk of flesh missing from the President’s left forearm.

Despite the television static, the oval shape of the wound is starkly familiar to the soldiers. They can see the jagged edges where human teeth ripped through the President’s skin and the glistening red center where the flesh was torn away. It’s a relatively shallow wound but the soldiers know it to be fatal and understand that if precautions are not taken, the President will join the ranks of the infected in a short three weeks. Behind June, a General begins to weep.

“This... not the end,” The President declares as tears catch in the folds of skin beneath her eyes. “For 7 years we have fought and died for our humanity. This cannot be the end.”

She speaks for another few minutes, each word reduced to white noise before she finally lowers herself into the embrace of her presidential chair. She picks up the revolver. Her face looks so sunken, her body exhausted beneath the weight of a dying country, as she considers the gun in her hand.

“I… if we were mistaken,” she whispers but does not elaborate; seeming to have run down like an old battery powered watch. Time and energy abandon her.

As the remnants of America watches, the President fades back into her chair, distantly staring at something off camera as she lifts the revolver to her head.

***

June sits in front of the black screen of the television for a long time before Ahmet realizes she’s still there and returns for her, clad in the same military garb he’s been wearing the last four days.

“You’ve got duties, June,” The Lieutenant says.

“Boss is dead,” she whispers.

“Zombs aren’t.” Ahmet folds camouflaged arms over his chest in a bulky pile. “They need you in the Choke Chamber.”

June can see their black and white reflections in the television screen like they’re just other lifeless shapes among the tables and chairs in the room. “What do you think the President meant when she said, ‘if we were mistaken’?” she asks.

Ahmet blinks vacantly at her. “Do you really think it matters?”

***

June’s feet carry her towards the Choke Chamber, numbly passing through several locked doors and descending three steel ladders until she finds herself in the cold, distant basement of the bunker. Everything echoes down there, the vast emptiness half lit by buttery, yellow light and half swallowed in dreaded murk. A soldier in a golf cart is waiting for her at the bottom of the last ladder. They do not speak as he drives her through the empty depths, skimming through pools of illumination and shadow as though guided by the glow of a sedated strobe light. Beneath her the golf cart rattles. Strips of silver duct tape snap dramatically in the wind.

A second soldier is waiting for June at the end of the hall.

“Thank god you’re here. There are three buses waiting with cargo and they’ve been screaming since they arrived and I… You know how it is, with the racket in there,” the soldier shifts from foot to foot, avoiding June’s empty gaze. “There’s another six buses on route and I can’t… I’ve been down here for twelve hours now. There were fifteen buses already. Fifteen!” He chokes back a sob, eyes hollow and glistening as he presses a clipboard into her hand. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I… you know how it is. Everybody’s got their duty.”

The soldier takes her place in the golf cart and June watches as the driver spins around and takes off the way they came, the electronic whir of the wheels slowly fading into silence. Then her body turns her around and carries her through the heavy steel doors into the room where the President said they’d win the war.

***

The Choke Chamber is a massive space of black-painted walls beneath a towering ceiling of steel bones. It is sharply rectangular, long, and empty save for the caravans of military vehicles and their soldiers. On the far side of the room a long ramp ascends on a hard angle towards an iron garage door where the army-modified buses enter with their cargo in a tide of unbearable shrieking and sharp metallic thuds. Inside the buses, the cargo fights for freedom, screaming and raging against the thin walls that hold them. They are the infected; Zombs as Ahmet and the other soldiers call them, rounded up by the military for mass extermination.

“Go on then,” one of the soldiers’ barks at June. “I can’t listen to this shit anymore!”

June moves on autopilot, passing behind a thick ring of machine-gun wielding soldiers clad in gas masks. They’re packed shoulder to shoulder, staring at the buses down the barrel of their rifles while June crosses to the far wall and uses her key pass to activate the gentle weaponry system. It lights up, responding as her fingers punch in several necessary codes and enter the data on the clipboard so the history books can one day report how tragic the war really was.

Wisconsin - 62. Iowa - 73. Missouri - 65.

June watches the response on the screen blankly. When it flashes green three times, she dons her own gas mask and finds herself lifting the steel nozzle of the hose from the wall. It’s vaguely heavy and somewhat cold within her grasp. Her palms sweat but her body turns casually. Even steps carry her onward, passing through the thick wall of soldiers on her way to the first yellow bus.

The screams become dramatically louder as June opens the door and ascends the four cramped steps into the retired school vehicle. Behind the driver's seat, a ten-inch thick wall of reinforced glass has been bolted into place from floor to ceiling with a steel valve embedded in its middle. The cargo immediately swarms it. June keeps her head down, refusing to look at them as she crouches and carefully screws the nozzle of the hose to the shining, silver valve.

When the seal is tight, she presses a blue button on the side of the nozzle. Click. Distantly, something hisses, and the hose clutched in her hand slowly expands as a poisonous insecticide floods from the tanks in the Choke Chamber’s walls and into the hose. Half a minute ticks away. The hose continues to inflate, and June prepares to twist the handwheel on the valve to release the fumes into the bus when something happens. A red-haired toddler is pushed to the front of the glass and for some reason, for the first time in years, June looks up at the cargo.

Beyond the glass, 65 infected men and women and children and the elderly are crying and screaming and pounding their fists on the glass. The toddler is so small. She’s wailing in distress, both of her small pudgy hands clutched around a heart-shaped locket that’s hanging from her neck. Where are her parents? Who gave her the locket? Who left her alone in a world to be eaten by monsters? June is paralyzed, mind begging her to look away, but she can’t tear her eyes from all the desperate faces and their hideous, gaping wounds.

“You can’t do this to us! You can’t do this!” One woman screams. “Please! We’re just people!”

“The doctors, they’re working on a cure. You don’t have to do this!” A man begs.

The toddler is screaming, and some part of June wants to react and do something but she is a product of 7 years of extreme military training, so she closes her eyes and reports back to the soldiers.

“Choke commencing,” she whispers into the coms as she twists the small hand wheel on the side of the valve. With a sigh, the insecticide spews from the hose into the hermetically sealed compartment of the bus and for a long moment the screams grow louder. The scent of bitter almonds leaks into the air.

“We’re still people!” The woman shrieks again, and June finds herself frozen, thinking about the President’s last words and fearing what she had thought was so mistaken when the cargo begins coughing. Then they are choking.

Soon they are silent.