THE GENTLEMAN

THE GENTLEMAN

It was early morning, and it was about to rain again when Emily woke up amid the shambles of the church. It’d been a miserable night with the storm that had blown, a night where she didn’t sleep much. She’d been rolling around on the wooden floorboards before finally sleeping for about an hour.

When her eyes opened, half-asleep, she looked through the cavity in the roof and saw the dark clouds flickering. The roof had been partially destroyed, and half of it was missing, with the trusses hanging from their fixtures. The shockwave from a mile away had caused the side wall of the church to cave in on itself, a tumbling mass of bricks, but above the ruins, she could make out a stained-glass depiction of a biblical scene amid the shattered glass.

Turning her head, she spotted Benjamin aiming her shotgun at a man clutching a few textbooks under his arm. “Gimme the gun, little man,” she said, “and put on your mask; he’s infected.”

She aimed at his head while fiddling with her mask.

“Please, my dear,” argued the man. “I mean you no injustice. Besides, how shall a teacher hurt you with a Cambridge textbook?”

“Well, I’ve seen some crazy things. You better get those hands up.”

“That’s truly flattering,” replied he. “If I wanted to harm you, I would’ve done it while you two were sleeping—in the middle of the night.”

“It’s my responsibility to protect the boy,” she said. “You raise those hands!”

But he refused blatantly. “I can see no reason whatsoever that you could kill a goodhearted fellow like me.”

“You must know that I kill anyone who’s infected? Do you think I won’t do it? Well then . . .” But she didn’t pull the trigger. Despite her desire to shoot, she restrained herself, waiting for an explanation. “It’s my Christian responsibility to kill you all,” she said. “Will you come between me and my Christian responsibility?”

Before he could respond, Emily walked toward him and pressed the gun against his head. She wanted to shoot him. But in the corner of her eye, Benjamin was looking at her. He was folding his arms with certainty, and he was sure she’d shoot him if he tried anything funny. Her finger touched the trigger; one wrong move and she’d do it, even just a flinch. She stared at him.

“I shall read to the boy if you please; I have a wonderful book about Liverpool history with me,” said the man plainly.

And when Emily lowered her gun it started to rain a little harder. Even though she walked to the window with a torch behind her back, which glimmered against the broken glass, she could see the man was humble. He kept holding onto his textbooks. Not hard, but steady, like he was protective over them, and Emily noticed how terribly infected his neck was. Then she noticed his mutant-like fingers. With the rain pouring outside, Benjamin asked, “What happened?” Since he could see it too, in the reflection of the broken glass.

The man resembled a drowned cadaver, his suit and tie sodden, his trousers stained up to the knees from walking through the mud. “Well, you better get out of here before I shoot you in the head.” She pointed at him with her gun.

“You mistake me, my dear,” said the man. “Do you know that all the students in my class were pretty fond of me?”

He looked at Emily, his eyes grim and dark, countersunk deep in their sockets like when you shine a light from the side of a cadaver. “Do you mind if I indulge in one of those bananas?” the teacher asked.

“No,” Benjamin replied. “What happened? Your skin—”

“Benjamin!” Emily interrupted. “I’m so sorry, the boy isn’t used to people.” She was humiliated—obviously the boy knew.

The man stood kind of like hiding in the shadows in front of the window, cloaked in the colorful reflections. The rain blew against the shattered glass, the mist spraying against his face in such a way that Benjamin got scared.

Anxiety clouded his gaze as he looked at the man. The man saw the fear in his eyes, but kindly handed him a textbook and said, “My dearest boy, you must breathe through your mouth for a minute. The pong shall soon dissipate into the air. The infection has changed me, but I’m not scared anymore. There’s an expression of disgust on your face that makes me want to leave. Dear boy, I also distrust these hands. But remember, your mother is standing over there with her firearm and will shoot me through the frontal lobe of my brain if I try to harm you. So do not be scared by my features. If I can convey the truth in front of your mother, your guardian angel, you really do not have to fear me—this teacher is harmless!”

The boy smiled warily. “What happened?”

A gust of momentary anger swept through the man as he touched his face, his queer fingers almost visible in the morning shadows. For him, there was something in the boy’s stare that made him feel so very, very uncomfortable. All night he had thought about nothing but lecturing the child on Liverpool history, but the boy’s anxious eyes compelled him to step backward to the cold window. A stream of moody emotions now rushed through the sad corners of his mind, and the potential student he’d watched in the middle of the night was now staring into his soul.

The man twitched heavily.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Emily said. Her voice sounded a little curious. She had to remind herself not to stare at his face since any eye contact made him highly uncomfortable.

After she observed him without feeling conscious about it, the man looked at her in a new light. He nodded while he scratched his neck. He wanted to talk about it. He wanted to tell her the entire story of what happened to him. Now that she looked at him as if he were normal, he felt an urgency to share the background of his dark fallacy.

“My students always came first,” stated he.

Then Emily walked toward him. “You shouldn’t be standing in the rain,” she said, pulling him by the arm while pointing her gun. He looked like a melting wax statue of a fat bastard. “You were saying . . .” she said. “You can tell me what happened. I truly want to hear what you have to say.”

Her stomach turned when she smelled what a monster smelled like. He must’ve seen how she pulled up her nose. Indeed he felt uncomfortable to have a girl standing so close to him. But she turned away, trying to find a breath of fresh air in the howling drag of the wind. Why did he smell so terrible? It would’ve been better if she didn’t come any closer.

“Indeed, all the parents were quite fond of me,” continued he. The scared little boy had evoked in him a gust of annoyance. He looked at Emily with water dripping from his hair. “The lad need not fear me. I have no intention of causing him any distress,” said the gentleman.

The boy relaxed.

And the man continued, dripping, watching Emily with his pitch-dark eyes. “One splendid morning, whilst conducting a lesson, I saw it. Manifested on the back of my hand. Misses Guenter suggested I should seek medical advice, but I collapsed right then and there, in her chambers. I regurgitated, experiencing internal agony as my veins transitioned from a shade of blue to the darkest of blacks.”

He stared into the twilight. “The rainfall is quite enchanting at this hour, wouldn’t you concur?”

The gentleman knew he gave Emily the creeps, even when he didn’t twitch. He tried hard not to twitch. And he continued. “Sprawled upon the carpet, I endeavored to grasp the circumstances befalling me,” said he. “There I was, hands placed upon my abdomen, attempting to divert my mind away from the burning pain.”

Emily tried to relax. Now and then his contortions made her think about all the horrors of the pandemic, how the infectious disease could strike anyone like a monster in the night. She imagined it took a powerful trust in the Lord to stay positive, though sometimes she questioned her faith as if she was trying to figure out why this innocent man had to suffer. When someone looked like this, she imagined she was right in thinking she was blessed to have a healthy boy to take care of.

Now and then she got to think about it. Not often though, which was a good thing. For the Lord kept her mind occupied with grief and sorrow, not to spend too much time thinking about religious things because the outbreak stretched her faith to the very limits. It was better when a person got infected and died than being trapped—like this man—somewhere in between the horrors of life and death. Her mother was right when she said we must seize every moment because we never know when we’ll run out of time. When Emily thought about that, she knew that this man’s time was running out quickly, but having a vaccine in her pocket, she could help him.

When the man leaned into the rain with his back, Emily was rolling up their sleeping bags. Benjamin was still dressed in his pajamas with a hoody pulled over his head and the Liverpool history book in his hands. And the man standing in the rain was dripping over the shattered wooden floorboards. “You see, the manner of my infection was rather atypical,” remarked he. “I dare say a pupil might have infected me with a slight cough.”

Emily was busy on the floor.

She packed their backpacks. She wanted to leave the man alone. But she was interested to hear what he had to say and then hopefully understand how the infection spreads from one person to the next. She focused her mind on Chicago and the university that could mass produce the vaccine—save humanity from imminent doom.

“Sunrise has seldom appeared so radiant,” said he. “I have borne witness to its beauty on countless occasions. How utterly ironic that yonder the sun sparkles, yet here we are haunted by rain. I have observed such a scene before. Indeed, I recall it clearly; the same day that I was engulfed by an atrocious fever, coughing up black saliva, and suffering a headache most severe.”

It was raining hard when Emily finished on the ground while the gentleman stood at the window, indulging in self-pity. He didn’t say anything else, just standing there looking into the most beautiful twilight at dawn. He shivered once as if someone had walked over his grave, and eventually, he said, “At the hospital, they administered a jab intended to uplift my spirits. However, that same inoculation gradually changed me into something else. Something horrid. Utterly grotesque!”

Then Emily lifted her gun and watched him twitch in the rain, leaning partially out of the window while experiencing a weird growth mutation. A thick and festering sludge began to secrete out of his ears. He grabbed his head in a frenzy now that it was bulging.

The man tried to scream, but not a single sound came. His mouth was wide open, with his black tongue sticking out. He struggled to stand on his feet. An intracranial hemorrhage grew violently inside of his brain, followed by those absurd twitches. He smiled, wiping the black liquid drooling from his mouth as he gulped for air.

“I hold the doctors accountable for infusing me with their poison,” proclaimed the gentleman. “However, I have signed a consent form for an experimental drug. It was a stipulation of the university if I wished to return . . . and by Jove, I wanted to go back. Teaching was my passion—it remains so to this day.”

It was just after sunrise when he finished the story. Emily took out a gas stove to boil water, since it was raining, with the teacher staring at a large piece of broken glass lying on the ground, staring at his horrible features.

Emily could see the boy sitting in the corner, paging through the history book, and felt that he handled the grief of Drake’s death quite well, or perhaps it didn’t sink in yet.

“Coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” she confirmed.

Emily struggled with her decision since the man was so paranoid about the vaccine he might freak out if she revealed the antidote in her pocket. What must she do? She could escape if she killed him right now, but she couldn’t shoot a kind-hearted, innocent teacher.

When the lightning flashed, Emily noticed a red dot on the teacher’s neck. At that moment, she was sure the sniper had found her again. She spent a few seconds deliberating what to do next. But abruptly, she heard the shot, a loud bang, shattering the stained-glass window. Saw the bullet struck a steel column inside of the church with a yellow spark.

Leaning into the rain, under the colorful glass depiction of Moses, the teacher paused. His face was as white as death. He stood with his back against the window. He smiled not.