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Fukushima Stray

Radiation sickness is slower than the humans say, especially when you’re in the throes of it yourself. Breathing in the particles and smog is instantaneous, and yet the full absorption and manifestation of the toxic miasma is agonisingly slow. First came the nausea.

By Dani BuckleyPublished about a year ago 26 min read
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Radiation poisoning has much of the same effects on animals as it does humans, though no one ever stuck around to see the results.

They said that the largely unaffected returned sometime later to Pripyat, only to shoot down the mongrels and mutts that had been abandoned by their owners and human compatriots, lest they carry the disease into neighbouring cities.

They had not yet returned here, in this dense thicket of straight, dry grass. Days blurred into one long, unending spiral of light and undulating dark, and I wondered when they would come, and what the bullet would feel like. I wondered if I would feel it pierce my coat before the darkness came, or whether the inevitable bang and flash would be all.

I remembered when the explosion happened. Instead of heightened moments of panic becoming a blur, the entire event can be recalled in hyper-focus. Even now, as I lie weakly among the dying, untamed weeds, I can see the chaos moving beneath my drooped eyelids, as if they were mere shadows, not memories. There was a flash and one’s gaze was immediately pulled to the plume of smoke rising from one of the large segments of the unsightly building. The birds ceased their chirping; the beasts who chased their prey in the tall grass stumbled and ground to a halt; the earthworms peered above their barracks of soil; rabbits dashed into their burrows, their snowy tails quivering with a fervent anxiety of wild unknowing. A visible disturbance rippled through everything. The very earth seemed to jolt with the gravity of something ominous having occurred. Something devastating. Then, came a silence so arresting, a sound as simple as a twig snapping would have felt like a gunshot.

They had foretold firstly of a tsunami, which had sent everyone into a frenzy of panic. Yet, aside from the angry moan of waves as they crashed into the high walls built around the ugly plant like a fort, we were protected from the worst of it. The wilderness heaved a placid sigh, as brethren in other areas of the country wailed in the agony of being drowned and dislodged from their homes in the midst of sodden debris.

The relief as the raging of the sea swelled and died over the horizon was quickly replaced with confusion. The shuddering form of the power plant loomed as an unexpected yet deadlier threat, one whose reach we could never had seen coming.

The explosion had unknowingly released a poison into our atmosphere. We had been so transfixed on the threat of the sea, we had missed the invisible assailant settling in the pits of our lungs as we sighed and gasped at the fragility of our surroundings. Each gulp was racking years onto the death sentence. We were silent consumers of a miasma indefeasible even if it were to be seen.

Radiation sickness is slower than the humans say, especially when you’re in the throes of it yourself. Breathing in the particles and smog is instantaneous, and yet the full absorption and manifestation of the toxic miasma is agonisingly slow.

First came the nausea.

The innards of the rat I had been snuffling at was regurgitated within an hour, only partially digested. The sickly pink and purple marbling of the hot, steaming guts glistened in a sheen of bile as it splattered onto the earth. After that I struggled to keep anything down. A body weakened will scream at its brain to consume, and yet whenever I came to do so, my stomach would turn abruptly, and I’d empty it into the grass not long after. To walk a few steps, or to focus on something in the immediate vicinity became gargantuan tasks. I could not do so without a wooziness seizing my entire frame.

The aftershocks of the earthquake which had first stirred up the dreaded tsunami were hardly felt, aside from the odd stumble. Now, unsteadiness was suddenly all-consuming.

Time in the wasteland seemed stagnant. The endless nausea made everything painfully static, and the days’ passing trudged by like the flailing of a lost pup in quicksand. The ground was dry, but my existence became submerged in a great quagmire that drained every ounce of strength from my barely conscious mind.

Some days after, in my delirium, I had been plodding through the overgrowth and struck my paw on a particularly jagged rock sticking out of the soil. It had been disturbed, clearly, and had been wedged, bolt upright, into the mud. The rains had come by this point and made the surface slick with dew. My paw slipped over the razor-like crag and I stumbled. A whimper shot from my throat. I recoiled, my paw retracted to my chest as I nursed my wound. After the throbbing gradually ebbed from the pad of my foot, I began to rest it gingerly against the cool ground and examine it.

In the sepia wash of yellows of my vision, dashed with cold blues, a dark, dull liquid oozed from a deep gash between two pads. I winced as I dared to flex the paw more, so that the pads opened a little and my unkempt talons protruded slightly. The slight stretch made the dark patch spread and the coppery stench of blood hit my nose with a force. The rhythmic pulsing of my foot was making my already pounding head swim.

The headache after the explosion had been almost constant. The endless heaving up meagre attempts at meals were enough to provoke a dull throb. My empty stomach was trying its hardest to give up a phantom prey, and the pressure on my head was alarming. This, on top of the incessant stinging in my foot, was making my brain feel as though the walls of my skull had cinched tightly around it, chafing its tender, ghostly matter against harsh bone.

This oppressive combination caused me to pass out. More than once.

I had crumpled into the coarse grass, and awoke, delirious in the cold rain. The overcast sky foretold no clues of time. Days could have passed, and I would have been none the wiser. The cavernous feeling in the pit of my stomach was ever-present and my paw still throbbed in grim harmony with my heartbeat. I was in a persistent state of limbo.

The only difference to my barren surroundings in this endless time-slip, was me. Something in the sickness had progressed. When I groomed myself, gingerly to avoid knocking the unbearably tender wound on my paw, I noticed my fur was falling out, particularly on my legs. And beneath it, the skin was screaming an angry red hue.

I had hobbled to the small honeycomb of puddles forming in the grooves of earth a short distance away. Desperately, I plunged my snout into the blissfully cool rainwater and drank. It was the only thing my body would allow me to do properly. Momentarily, the thirst burning in the back of my throat like a ball of splinters ceased. But it wouldn’t last long. It was as if my body was letting everything nutritious slip right through it, missing all the places that needed it most.

The cut on my paw also began to grow worse.

The pain was continuous, but I was able to push it to the back of my brain most of the time. Yet, whenever I looked down, my sight drifting in and out of focus as the waves of nausea made their tidal assault, the cut had seemed to spread. My leg had taken on a mangled appearance, like the diseased root of a great oak. The colours, even in the dull wash of tones such as mine, seemed off. The mechanistic knit of bones seemed more pronounced, likely from days of retaining only fragments of meals, and the blackish hue had deepened. While the centre of the wound glistened with the phlegmatic sheen of infection, the milky centre gave way to an eerie darkness on its fringe. A darkness which was creeping up the joint and pushing into the increasingly patchy fur of my leg.

The black ring around the wound spread insidiously across the breadth of my paw as the myriad of days slipped by.

As I was examining the wound, a hotness welled in the corners of my eyes. Acutely, I was conscious of a small ravine being carved through the fur of my cheek by this warm trickle. I was confused. Momentarily distracted from the stark black spot spoiling my paw, I was jolted from my thoughts by the peculiar realisation that the liquid, unlike tears, did not sting.

In the same instant, an odd film had begun to well at my lash line, obscuring the lower half of my vision in a milky mist. The pigment eluded me. Quickly, I blinked away the translucent gloss and the sepia fog sitting on my horizon cleared. I felt the droplet it had quickly coagulated into slip from my socket and land softly into the puddle beneath my feet.

The glassy water was suddenly punctured by the harsh glob of my alien tiers. Its colour, now more intelligibly brown in contrast to the rainwater, bled its way outwards to the banks of this microcosmic lake. I stared at the rusty spot for some time before a silent siren of panic sounded in the depths of my shrivelled, empty stomach. I pieced together its properties and drew myself up to the sobering conclusion that the tears were formed of my own blood.

Waves of hot panic pulsed through my body like a bat’s high-pitched screech. They extended to the nailbeds in which my overgrown talons were nestled, and beyond. There, they congregated and emitted an uncomfortable tingle, until the next onslaught of white-hot tides rode out again from the pit of my stomach.

The persistent nausea was unnerving, but it was something I could combat, as it was familiar to prior experience. Consuming any diseased prey came with unpleasant side effects. I recalled the memory of picking at a mangled bird I found in the brush. Days later I was struck down with a fever. I tossed and turned in the small den I had made for myself in the undergrowth for what seemed like days. I had been unable to stand for fear of nausea, and to eat anything was a gargantuan chore then, as it has become now. Time had seemed to stretch in an odd way, until lucidity crept back into my body. The light was almost blinding when I trod gently outside for the first time since the sickness consumed me. I was sure whatever the bird carried would kill me too. I had been through such tribulations in the past; perhaps none so extensive, but I had a reference point. No matter how dreaded the symptoms were, I had the confidence that they were manageable.

These tears, however, were a sign of something else. Something insidious, and implicitly destructive.

The bloody tears didn’t stop for some time. When I thought the flow had been stemmed, the familiar trickle of the hot, coppery liquid would start up again, like intermittent rainfall.

And with each torrent of crimson droplets, my skin cracked, and my bones weakened. The deterioration was more rapid than I could ever have anticipated. I could not press myself off the ground without my joints buckling, and when my frame was steady enough to assume a standing position, my limbs quivered uncontrollably. My jaw throbbed, as though the hinge of bone on which it swung had succumbed to rust. In the space of a few weeks my being had been drained of all the verve required to live as a stray. Hunting was now impossible, and rather than shelter from the elements, I could only bed myself down in a cluster of nearby spots beneath the flimsy protection of a sparsely thicketed group of trees.

My ability to migrate to a more densely packed brush was further hindered by my paw, which I now struggled to lean on entirely. When I did dare to, a pain so blinding caused a yelp to tear through my throat, so high a pitch in helpless agony that the quiet forest stirred in response.

As I lay, sprawled on the grass and breathing heavily just with the effort of remaining lucid, I examined the paw, gingerly lifting it to my snout. The skin looked as though it had been charred, the mysterious black mass spreading further up the limb. My nails, overgrown as they were, had all fallen out, without my knowing.

The creatures around me were showing signs of suffering, too. More than once, I’d narrowly avoided being struck by the lifeless body of a bird plummeting from the sky. It must have wistfully tried to fly in its weakened state and its tired body curtailed the journey early. I imagined its tiny heart beating ferociously against its frail rib cage in a final, frantic push to stay airborne; to do the thing that had always come so naturally to the creature since a few weeks following its emergence into the world. The heart would judder and fail like a faulty engine, and the tiny creature’s wings would snap into the rigidity of shock, before adopting a morbid limpness as it drifted through limbo. Then, the bird had inevitably dropped.

Birds that could no longer fly; fish that lay clustered in the stream’s end, their bodies robbed of their ability to swim; mutts who failed to track and hunt their prey. I thought of how it was before, and how this small patch of earth in a secluded corner of the world had existed in such piece. Rarely disturbed by humans, each chain in life’s great cycle accepted their role and carried it out dutifully. To be aimless was to exist in the tranquillity of utter harmony with one another. I had taken it for granted, and even yearned sometimes for the comforts of domesticity when I had been well. Now even the simplest things seemed out of capacity. The placidity of life was robbed not by harsh seasons or by the skittish migration of prey; instead, the humans had their poison unleashed on the land. Through no fault of their own, of course.

I hoped, anyway.

Though this thought led me, and many other wild ones, to wonder how easy it could have been had the tsunami not been the only impending catastrophe. What of human error? Even the simplest of us slip when protecting heavy burdens. How often had prey had escaped my jaws when I had not clenched tight enough around the windpipe. Humans, though bright, have never been without cause for blind complacency.

The tsunami, devastating as it surely was, would at least have been quick. A few perilous moments before the bough broke would have been preferable to this seemingly unending agony. Then, a swirl of murkiness, seconds of screaming lungs, before finally came the void.

Rather, the flood barriers had sealed in a worse fate.

This time, bloodless tears slipped from my eyes. I curled up, and waited for some form of relief, whatever form that came in.

•••

As I lay there, amongst the thicket of greenery, ribs pressed and heaving against rain-soaked skin, I ached for the burning to end. The sickness had become permanent, even when not in motion, and my skin itched as though bugs were nestled beneath my fur. I had started to pant heavily, as though I had been tracking through the forest without sustenance, yet all I could do was lie there and wait. A small pool of saliva had formed beneath by head. My snout was partly dipped in the cold puddle. I did not care.

Then they came.

White, faceless ghosts shifting through the mist of rainfall. They carried strange contraptions, slung around their shoulders.

I heard them before I saw them, of course. They announced their presence by a strange popping sound. I could barely lift my head to seek the source. Gratefully, while my eyes were weeping and bloody, and held shut by days of odd secretions, my ears still worked. A series of loud bangs erupted through the trees. In the silence of the dying forest, it was deafening. I winced.

Through the bleary slit of vision my eyes allowed, bright flashes of light that matched the odd popping noise were visible. Sporadically, they lit up the brush like bottled lightning. Close to the ground, these small eruptions continued. Then, the figures emerged through the undergrowth.

I tried to draw up what little strength I had left. Whatever they were doing, a deep, innate instinct screamed at me that it was dangerous.

This suspicion was confirmed when one of the phantasms drew up the nose of its strange device and pointed it at a rabbit which had strayed dozily across the earth-made path. The rabbit’s legs had lost their natural spring, and the fur on its behind was patchy and discoloured.

I raised a trembling head for a better view as the small creature exploded. My head jerked back in horror, my ears striking the grass beneath me. The bullet ripped not only through its skull, but clove deeply through the rivets of the rabbit’s spine, prominent now from the miasma’s disease. The thinning fur was ripped apart, and the creature’s mangled corpse lay as a heap of unrecognisable flesh on the ground.

In me, an indignant wave swept through my shrivelled gut. For the first time I felt something other than nausea or pain. It was clear now, as the ghosts advanced through the undergrowth, that they feared further displacement of the plague they themselves had allowed to be stirred by the tsunami. While the poison of the power plant wreaked its havoc on our home, they had been preparing to stunt its journey into theirs. Had an innocent rabbit scampered into society, with its fluffy coat disguising beneath skin reddened from invisible burns, an eager child may have caught the disease. Naively, one small stroke of the rabbit’s smooth rump may have left the child happily toddling back to its home, blissfully unaware, until the red welts of radiation bloomed on its pale skin. While the forest suffered, the ghosts and their death-machines fretted over a fate that had never been written. A contingency. A maybe. They decided only now that the suffering must stop, and not for our benefit, but for the safety of their kin, who knew nothing of how we wasted away in the brush for days on end.

I thought of how the bird had fallen, dead from the sky. I wondered how painful its wings had become as the invisible smog brushed against them, washing its waves of death with each rustle of wind. I imagined the once dainty, noble creature struggling to unfold them, and not knowing why. I heard, somewhere deep in the back of my skull, the lonely cry it would have made when it birthed eggs that would never hatch. Its beak prodded them, until one cracked and the deformed chick spilled out amidst the fluid. All that warmth, all that care, for nothing. It had probably silently desired an end to its suffering days before it did so, and yet it continued to wither away on its perch. Until, desperate to feel normal again, it had set out on a flight that would claim its life.

I continued to watch, bitterly. The white spectres gave the rabbit little regard before pressing onward in their mission to eradicate the most glaring products of radiation sickness from the earth.

My jowls curled back over my teeth. I watched intently and waited for my turn.

The phantoms trudged through stray tendrils of foliage, their thick boots snapping an endless supply of twigs. Each crack was thundering in my ears, and I tried not to wince, but in my weakened state it was impossible. Every sense was an assault, or at least ones I still felt were. Hunger had assimilated with breathing; it was constant, and somewhat forgettable now. Still, I drew my blackened, oozing paw close to my chest and pushed myself onto my back legs. I was unsteady, swaying slightly as I rolled upright, but I eventually settled into a position that, despite my emaciated appearance, might have been mistaken as a greeting.

Noticing movement, some of the ghosts’ heads snapped in my direction. They waved their arms at those who didn’t, and tapped them on the shoulders, pointing at my withered form. They soon followed suit, and advanced forward in their odd cluster of ivory.

My breath caught in my chest. My torso inflated and I drew myself up as proudly as I could. My blood-filled eyes must have seemed unkind as they drew closer. Their own were concealed behind odd masks. They were all the same, with the snout funnelling out into horizontal chambers. The eyes were hidden behind gridded windows, wide, circular and void of all feeling. The hands that clutched the popping machines were shiny and black, as if a strange material was stretched over them. It reminded me of the balloons children had toddled around carrying in a town I had once skulked in the alleys of. They were unlike any humans I had ever seen; they were truly ghostly. Their uniform faces belied an alien quality, and disguised all speech. Their language came in short, sharp directional bursts through their plastic snouts. It was garbled and unnerving. Several flailed their arms towards me, confirming my presence, and with that their footfall switched decidedly in line with where I sat.

I noticed one of the spectres was carrying a strange device in its oddly clad hand. It crackled loudly as the ghost waved it in the air in front of them. The crackling grew to a higher frequency as they closed the gap between us, and its constant stream of white noise blared menacingly in my ears. The phantom aimed the device directly at me, and the crackling became unbearable, screeching at a pitch that was undoubtedly irritating for them, but dizzying for me.

The lead ghost switched off the device and stuffed it in the satchel on its hip, seemingly satisfied with the result he took from it. There were murmurs through the gridded snouts as they stared at me with their windowless eyes. One of them pointed to the ground, where my decaying paw was elevated just above the dirt. I pressed it into my chest, as though shielding the damaged limb from view. They conferred with one another some more, and there was a series of subsequent nods. In affirmation of one another’s diagnoses, they drew themselves up, and the head phantom placed both hands on the machine that had struck and killed the rabbit only moments before.

I met their empty gazes as defiantly as I could, though the effort of standing made my vision sway. I felt the skin on my behind prickle from the pressure of sitting down. I wanted it all to fall away. And yet, as much as I wanted to simply lie down and sink into the earth, I did not want to go at the hands of these ghostly humans.

There was a series of snaps and clicks, before the human aimed the nose of its machine squarely between my eyes. The barrel was several metres from me, but it may as well have been pressing against my skull. I remembered how the rabbit had blown apart. I thought of the bullet ripping through my skull, casting bone and brain matter aside like a bizarre firework display. My muscles quivered. I raised myself slightly off the ground. My sore, broken skin felt momentarily relieved.

I showed my teeth to them. My jaw sang with the ache of sudden movement. A click sounded at the top of the ghost’s machine. The nose bowed slightly and an aim was met.

Rotting paw held tightly to my chest, I used what was left of my strength and sprang into the air.

A flash and deafening bang erupted from the end of the gun. My feet had already left the floor. Something struck me in the rib cage and skewed the axis of my leap slightly. Still, as my good front paw connected with the ghost’s torso, I knew my trajectory was unmarred. My back legs slammed into the ghost’s waist, and an audible cry ripped through the tinny acoustics of the weird plastic snout.

My teeth, teeth that were softening and rattling in my jaw with the slow decay of whatever poison laced the air, tore at the ghost’s shoulder. Its white hide fell away easily. Soon the stretchy black undercoat followed. Then, the familiar, leathery gristle of flesh sliding against my front teeth.

My dry tongue was soon quenched with a hot gush of blood, its warm metallic taste satiating me for a moment. I was reminded briefly of the sweetness of raw meat, on which I used to feast without issue. This fleeting memory heightened my anger. I sank my teeth deeper, before tearing them through the plump canvas of human skin. I did this as quickly and ferociously as I could, until the ghost began emitting piercing screams which made my shoulders hunch with the desire to recoil. I realised why the phantasm’s lament had reached such a feverish pitch; my latest assault had meandered blindly into its neck, and a violent scarlet spurt was emitting rhythmically from the wound. We fell to the floor. I retained my grip on the spectre’s surprisingly fragile flesh, as his screams of protest continued fruitlessly. My snarling jaws curled into an expression that humans would recognise as something akin to their infamous ‘smile’.

Just as I was making significant progress, loud pops went off all around me. Sharp things connected with my side, tearing through my ribs and my spine. I kept ripping and tearing until I began to feel woozy. The ghost whose collarbone was crunching between my teeth was slamming me repeatedly in the head with his machine. My rotting paw, still tucked into my body, seared with pain in the frenzy of it all.

Soon, I became conscious of hot warmth spreading down my sides. I could no longer shake off the blows to my skull from the hard metal machine. The ghost beneath me continued to scream, but the pathetic wails were growing more distant, almost muffled. Strange, for my ears to fail me now, when they had always been so effective before. I had not ever guessed that, when the time arrived, they would be one of the first of my senses to abandon me.

My legs buckled and I rolled off the moaning phantom, who took immediately to nursing the mangled flesh protruding from the shoulders of his white overalls. The skin was stained red and sat in stringy tears along the curve of his neck. Somewhere in the crimson void, a splintered bone glowed stark white.

The ghostly humans became real phantoms once more as they clustered around the writhing form of their comrade. Panicked shouts erupted from their midst. One of them, incensed by my attack, pulled a smaller, hand-sized version of the death machine from its belt and aimed it at my head. Then, likely seeing my laboured breaths tearing from my emaciated form, turned the popper’s nozzle upwards and snarled something from beneath its odd, plastic muzzle. It then turned swiftly to attend, like the rest of the phantoms, to tend to the screaming wraith. A good portion of its crisp, white garb was now poisoned with scarlet.

I knew whatever necrotic curse sat and festered in my body would soon be laying its proverbial larvae deep in the marrow of the ghost’s broken bone. The desire to spread such a curse was surely malicious and, the inkling of such behaviour had never before manifested in my thoughts. But after weeks of suffering and seeing the forest wither and wain before my eyes, I could no longer keep the urge to share my experience with those who designed it.

My body exhaled as the horizon beckoning me through the trees took on a dull hue, not unlike the onset of dreamy twilight.

My snout rested against the familiar earth; the tip of my once healthy, wet nose coated in a friendly crust of dirt. I let the invisible tendrils of the loam wrap around my tired body. The hurt was ebbing away. I could no longer feel the sickening jolt every time the slimy flesh of my wounded paw slithered over the bone. It was bliss.

I raised my quivering eyebrows and saw the remains of the rabbit, just beyond the shifting mass of ghosts flurrying frantically around one another. In a blink, the blood was gone. The decimated mass of bone and fur was whole again and glowed enticingly through the brush.

I sprang up suddenly, limbs embowed with the jovial bounce of life once more. I looked down in a mixture of shock and delight; my rotting paw was able to take my weight once more. I trotted on it happily, and even bore down upon it as I hunched my shoulders in an attempt to spy the rabbit flitting along the forest path.

I felt saliva wash over my tongue with a fresh hunger, one I knew I could satisfy. My jaw parted excitedly. Its hinge no longer ached.

The rabbit paused and flashed an inviting glare at me with its wild, tawny-brown eyes. They were wild with a fear fervent with the adrenaline of warm, vein-coursing life. Then, it bolted skittishly into the brush once more.

I chased it through the trees, leaving the ghosts behind.

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About the Creator

Dani Buckley

Pennings of the dark and cinematic. Phantasmagoria abound.

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