I wrote this yesterday. This story is meant to be a prequel for my upcoming novel, Spawn. It tells the story of how the small town of Alleluia in northern Sweden became Hell on Earth. This story takes place ten+ years before the novel, although I haven’t yet decided its true timeline placement (it could be twenty or thirty years prior). None of the characters in this short story, however, will appear in Spawn.

UPDATE: The second draft of this story has replaced the first draft. The story is now far more continuous and slightly more meaningful. In essence, it makes good sense now. I may reach out for peer editing to complete a third draft.

Alleluia

by Jason Rappaport

I don’t remember quite how long ago it was. It could have been over forty years that I’ve been sitting here, perhaps more; these years have been spent in turmoil and distress. But nobody can come and rescue me. Listen, reader, to the tale of the small city of Alleluia, Sweden…

Alleluia is a small town that fills the area of and around an even smaller peninsula on the north side of Sweden. For many years, it peacefully prospered. This was, perhaps, the majority of its life. Its citizens, I included, lived in peace. The weather was never harsh, and the warmth from the summers would bathe our community and restore our spirits, chilled from the winter’s cold. In this way, life went on.

We regularly held town council meetings to discuss important issues. I distinctly remember the decision passed early in my childhood that resulted in contractors from surrounding cities visiting to measure, draft and build a bridge. Our town was overcome by civil engineers and, in about two years, we would have a completed bridge from the housing district to the lighthouse – each which was on a separate miniature peninsula.

The bridge did a world of good for our community. Those who worked in the lighthouse, ensuring that our fishermen returned safely, were now able to walk to and from their job as opposed to driving many miles. But the bridge was more than just a shortcut to the lighthouse to us – it was a shortcut to our childhood dreams. As children on Alleluia’s small peninsula we knew that playthings were a scarcity. A few toys from Oslo shipped in on occasion when our parents returned from business trips and vacations. When they were especially generous, they would drive to the back of the lighthouse, a children’s playground. We would play for hours on end, not stopping until either one of us was injured or our parents tore us from the monkey bars with their forceful, loving hands.

One day, when the sky turned dark and the contractors were busy building the new bridge, I asked my mother if she would drive me to the playground. She shook her head, looked at the floor. Told me a storm would be coming, that it was not safe to travel to the playground.

“But mother, why are the builders out making the bridge if it’s dangerous?” I asked, puzzled.

“Honey, people will do so much for money, even stand out in the rain!” It was eerie the way she spoke; her voice was filled with joy, unlike it had been just a moment ago. She seemed happy that the workers were out in the rain, and soon the lightning. She seemed happy that their lives were at risk for a few dollars. I would learn only later in life why my mother was so happy, and why I had all the reason to be unhappy with my future condition. Although nobody was ever struck by lightning – it never even rained – I learned at that point in my childhood how to speculate, how to assume. I began to make judgments not only about situations, but about people. To some, I was humanizing. To my friends I was “maturing.” To myself, I was unimproved. I found no sense in worrying about the world, especially at my age, but I was powerless to stop my instinctive premeditations.

Alleluia’s council passed a second motion years after the bridge was complete. Childhood was now getting special attention. Our one-room schoolhouse would become three rooms larger to cope with the growing population of Alleluia. In the meantime, it also seemed we were harboring our own private industrial revolution; one family had a microwave. A refrigerator. Then another family. Soon we were all in possession of these gifts from God. Our quality of life was rated by some nationwide magazines as one of the greatest in the country. I was just thirteen, enjoying the rest of my childhood in our temporary state of luxury.

It would be years before a classmate of mine (the school had now been extended to ten classrooms, a lobby and a hallway) fell sick with a strange illness. Our doctors quickly identified it and purged it with penicillin, but the infection returned later that month despite the treatment. This relapse did not cooperate with the demands of the penicillin. The local hospital tried an incredibly vast series of treatments, but nothing worked. The girl, Tammy, whose name is inscribed upon my home, perished not a week after she was sentenced to surgery. Although the surgery removed parts of the infection that had gathered around her face and near the surface of her skin, it failed to remove those bacteria that had found a feast in her vital organs. Weak and deteriorated from the inside, she coughed and passed out one night, then awoke nevermore.

Teachers gathered the next day in the lobby of the school; students were not allowed to enter. We watched as they discussed the death, the eventual burial, how to relay the news to us, the students who already knew that something had gone awry. Tammy, who had been in our classes since we were small children, was gone forever. For some, the grief was inexpressible. The school offered counselors, but few took them. Many asked to be excused for the burial. I waded through the school day, neither sure of what had really happened nor confident enough to grieve in front of the entire student body.

Several students, in an attempt to mock the living, used the day as an excuse to skip school. Society condemned those people, labeled them as heartless demons that cared not for life. We, as students who were slowly maturing, slowly making assumptions about the world, blamed them later on for the immense tragedy to strike our city.

I, however, headed home that day and buried myself in my bed. My head was one with the pillow, and even though I only knew Tammy so slightly, it felt as though she had really been a special friend of mine, not just a buddy who shared writing tips with me during Swedish class, or explained the all-encompassing principles of science in-between classes. She was knowledgeable, and it felt as though her knowledge had been released into the wild after her death, ravaging upon the citizens of Alleluia. We said a prayer for her that night, all of us together sealing our fate as a society.

It took only a few weeks for word to spread throughout the country, and eventually globally: We as a human race were overusing antibiotics, and if abuse failed to wane we may all meet the same fate as poor Tammy. Bacteria were evolving, becoming resistant to our medicines! Meanwhile humans remained the same, our powerless immune systems and feeble construction leaving us vulnerable to fate. We were, and are, all so vulnerable – surely you have experienced this, reader. You know how vulnerable humans can be! So it was entirely expected that we should be susceptible to a similar attack.

It was not long after Tammy’s death that I experienced the strangest event ever to strike Alleluia. I was bored walking home, and not in a mindset to complete schoolwork. I crossed the bridge into the playground; all of us who were now older did not play in the playground anymore, and at this time the younger children were still in school. I was alone in the sand and in the wood chips. At least, I thought I was.

I heard breathing.

Where was it coming from? I spun around, expecting it to be one of my classmates. Nobody there.

I looked up. It could not have been from the sky, but perhaps I had only heard an airplane belching its way through the clouds. But nothing was in the sky. Hastily, I look down – nothing was at my feet. However the sand pit, a few meters from my feet, heaved heavily up and down, and in and out. Somebody was there, buried in the sand. I crept over to the sand pit, looked down inside and saw a wide open mouth emanating a sleepy sound from a body. Somebody were sleeping – and of all the places! I had the mind to reach down, grab those protruding lips and lift the perpetrator out of the sand for interrogation. But when I brushed the sands aside, I was paralyzed by what I saw.

There she was, sleeping, as though her tragedy had never happened – Tammy, in front of me, in the sand. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I didn’t have the courage to wake her, and I doubted that it was her in front of me. After minutes of silent staring, I eventually reached out my hand and touched her face, to ensure it was really alive. The heat of her skin warmed my hand in the cool autumn air. She was very much alive.

In hindsight, I wish I had been able to report this phenomenon before taking matters into my own hands. But in my own twisted definition of maturity, I assumed that nobody but me would understand the situation. I sat there for an hour, in front of the sand pit, watching her sleep as her lungs’ up and down movements rocked the sand as waves rocked the shore. She, the ocean, and my silence were in perfect harmony with one another. I brushed some more sand away – was she still wearing clothes? I didn’t care; she was alive! Somehow, her clothes had survived. They were musty, but not covered in dirt. The casket had protected them.

I was in the process of wondering how she could have escaped the casket when I sat down. I’ll always believe that she was so in tune with her surroundings in that death-sleep that she felt the vibrations of my bottom on the wood chips. She woke up at that instant, stretched, and wiped the sand off of her. Looked at me. Asked where she was. And I screamed.

How could she have the nerve to ask where she was? Did she not know she had been dead? More importantly, did she not know she had crawled out of her own grave and fallen asleep in a sandbox? A new Tammy had emerged from the sands, spawned right in front of me, who had no recollection of ever having died. She remembered being “in extreme pain” one night, and recalled possibly falling sleep. But death? What a farfetched notion! She seemed ready to slap me for simply suggesting it.

“Surely the town would be in an uproar if I died so young!” She was quite confident that she was a main attraction of Alleluia; she was right, in part. Many people had known her, and although Alleluia was growing, her death reached far and wide and, as I’ve told you dear reader, internationally. Now, aside from the fact that I was stricken dumb to see her breathing – much less sitting up and conversing with me – I began to think that she had never initially been dead. I would find out later that she had never been buried; her parents kept the casket in the church (which I rarely went to) for a wake that I had never attended. She climbed out of the open casket in a sleepwalk-like trance, and then fell asleep in the sandbox. The wind pushed the sand over her.

However, running around and preaching that she was living once more was not the proper way to spread the word. Not that she had ever been dead, but it was difficult to convince the citizens of Alleluia, especially as a “maturing” thirteen year old, that the dead had revived. Aside from the superstitious among us who feared an invasion of the undead, most everybody immediately refused to believe my story without further conversation. But I daren’t bring Tammy out into the light. Telling Alleluia was one thing – showing her was another thing entirely. I begged my parents, who were a part of the town council, to raise the issue at their next meeting. They promised they would.

Meanwhile, Tammy and I were forced to spend an extended time together. She had agreed to remain hidden – in my room – and I agreed to ensure that nobody would find her until people were convinced that she was alive and had woken up, confused, in the casket and run away from home, surviving off of fruits and berries in the woods. I brought to her food, drink, and clothing. I was able to convince my mother that I had been meeting in secret with Tammy (or, as she said, “Tammy’s spirit”), and she humored me by buying me clothes in Tammy’s size.

That also meant that I would be expected to lead the town to this so-called living Tammy when residents were convinced the dead could be brought back to life. I was able to properly convince the council by revealing the empty casket. The council agreed to create a small search party to find Tammy, Tammy’s spirit, or the grave robber who had stolen Tammy’s corpse from its new wooden home. The search party was led by my parents and accompanied by Tammy’s parents, who were in disbelief that somebody may have spotted their daughter alive. I conversed with Tammy, who I was now quite comfortable talking to, and told her to enter into the woods near the edge of town. I also instructed her to wear the clothes I had given her, and bring a morsel of bread into the woods just in case she became hungry, and that I would see her in a few hours.

I told her to wander. We had to find her properly – as though she were truly lost.

In the night, near midnight, our search party came across a sleeping Tammy on the outskirts of town, wearing the clothes my mother had bought for her. Before assuming she was alive, my parents insisted that I had taken her body out of the church, dressed it up and leaned it against the tree, which was preposterous in its own way, but in hindsight not as preposterous as Tammy’s living state. However, Tammy’s parents were overexcited, and ignored my parents’ statements. They shook Tammy awake, and she woke up. My mother and father were stunned, not to mention frightened out of their wits. The rest of the twenty-man search party screamed so loud that Alleluia itself rumbled and shook from the vibrations of the screams.

They were screams that shook Alleluia for the next forty years.

Tammy was brought immediately back to the hospital, where she was examined for any signs of strange life. Oddly enough, the doctors were able to find only one thing wrong: She was still infected with the bacteria that had supposedly killed her. Right now they were refraining from destroying her insides again. In fact, it looked like the bacteria had had a complete change of heart; they had repaired all of her vital organs, previously destroyed. On top of that, they were providing her with vital nourishment. The doctors mechanically reported that this nourishment was not enough to sustain her without a regular intake of food, but enough to keep her alive for an extended period of time.

So it was true, she had never died.

Alleluia became, at this point, the forefront of a brand new biological research. These bacteria, unnamed, “killed” their host, and then revived them a week or so later. For what purpose it could not be determined, and nobody would find out just exactly what these strange strains were accomplishing until years passed us all by. In the meantime, I had grown accustomed to being by Tammy’s side. It wasn’t surprising when I myself fell ill of unknown causes. A quick tissue sample from my face showed that I was infected with these strange bacteria, and that they were now infecting me as they had her.

Over the next two weeks, I became weaker. Other citizens began to show signs, but none as noticeable as mine. I remained the center of attention – Tammy was on track to remain alive, and seemed to be put on the back burner while I was dying. Nobody knew if I would remain alive, and I was quite scared. They refused to perform surgery on me, which frightened my teenage heart even more. I was quite sure that if these microscopic demons hadn’t come for Tammy, they would surely come for me. Would I be the first in a long line of infected Alleluians to fall asleep and never wake up?

Tragically, that was not the case. I was told when I woke up that I had been dead for nearly a month, that Tammy was now fully recovered and back to her normal self (perhaps even better than normal, but what she recovered from I could never figure out – she’d always seemed fine to me). It was only a few days ago that they began to detect my vital signs once again. During this time they monitored the bacteria, studied what they were doing. And yet their actions remained a mystery. In the meantime, other citizens were either falling ill or had already fallen ill. At least five were dead. For now.

Slowly we became the city that knew not death. It would be years before the infected would realize what was being done to them – a horrifying mutation that broke the chain of the living forever. And worst of all, the bacteria never responded to any of our treatments. It was completely resistant. By now the scare of antibiotic resistant bacteria around the world was so great that scientists in America, Germany and Japan were all sure that they had developed a serum worthy of a Nobel Prize, while those of us in Alleluia had abandoned our research to tend to the dying. One of the foreign serums purged several resistant bacteria. Another one was too powerful, and dissolved a strain of Deinococcus. For some reason, the Americans thought that Deinococcus, an incredibly resilient strain of bacteria, had infected us – even though it’s harmless.

However, I do feel bad for the man who took that antibiotic. It washed his digestive tract clean, I heard, and eventually dissolved it completely. He died in mere hours; such a shame for science. Despicable, really.

But we were far worse off than that silly test subject. Our society was slowly dissolving, each man becoming his own entity. In a short year nearly half of Alleluia was infected with this pseudo-deadly disease. Those of us who weren’t infected – I not included among them – began to fear death, and even fear life. Several people were taking much longer to awake from death. Doctors were unsure if they would live. Several infected agreed to allow the surgeons to pick at their insides while they were dead. So when my father was infected, I had to watch them drag his lifeless body into the surgical ward. My time spent with Tammy had now come to an end. Alleluia was so concerned with its epidemic that it completely forgot its first two cases. I was alone now – my mother was becoming increasingly afraid of my father and I. She began to threaten leaving the family if conditioned worsened.

The surgeons who ripped my father open were new. The previous surgeons had been infected, and were replaced. When the old surgeons awoke from death, they were furious – but none could deny that they were infected with a disease, and the world couldn’t risk that in a doctor. Now all surgeons wore biohazard garments.

I don’t recall what they found in my father, but they sealed his body up right and that’s all I cared about. As long as he was fine, I had some family to be with. The city was dividing in two – those of us infected, and those who were not. There was no visible difference between us, but every day more and more crossed over the line dividing our city, entering lifeless into the hospital.

In three more years only two-thirds of the citizens were infected. However, that didn’t mean that the infection had slowed, but that Alleluia was still a growing community. For some reason, our population had doubled. I was seventeen at the time, but I looked thirteen. Everybody who had been infected still looked exactly as they had after they woke up four years ago, three years ago, two. So now we had become the devil-people who never aged. We felt normal, but we knew that the bacteria inside of us were sustaining us, keeping us alive and fit.

As the years passed us by, tensions strained between Alleluia’s two parties. I should have looked over twenty, but I only looked fifteen. Those not infected, we feared, would overthrow the town and attempt to suppress us, or even get rid of us. Alleluia was beginning to crumble. The lifeless among us struck fear into the living – those who feared that “the circle of life” was being dismantled by our presence. People live, people die, but the infected lived on. We aged so slowly, it was as though we didn’t age at all. Ten years since Tammy’s case and she was still looking nearly the same age – as were the other five-sixths of Alleluia. After fifteen years, tensions grew so strong between the infected and the healthy that I was not able to leave my home without fear of being attacked. Alleluia had long since fallen on the quality of life scale we had once ranked so high upon. Nobody came to our fair city anymore. Many of us didn’t want to stay. Those who tried to leave were killed by the healthy, who feared the infection’s worldwide domination. They were not about to allow Satan’s Disease to conquer God’s green Earth.

My mother finally broke down and abandoned our family – she could no longer deal with the pain of living with the seemingly immortal. It made her more afraid of death, because it never crept upon us. Later, she would join a troupe of the uninfected in burning our house down.

The town council, now comprised of only the uninfected of Alleluia, passed a motion that the infected would not discover until the construction began – a massive, cylindrical tower in the housing district. Those of us whose homes had been burned were forced into new homes a few miles away from the peninsula. Where our old homes stood – on the edge of the peninsula – this tower was constructed. It rose two hundred feet high at its completion, a giant among our all homes save the lighthouse, and certainly among us as humans. On the inside of this tower was a thin, metallic spiral staircase; no light but a few torches on the walls provided a glimpse of what the tower’s function truly was. In the walls were holes, rectangular outcroppings that went into the walls of the tower seven feet deep, just enough to fit an average sized human being.

When Tammy disappeared, we, the infected, knew something was amiss. She had not run away since the incident where I had told her to hide in the woods. A day later a letter arrived at her “home” from her parents, regretting that they had to annihilate their daughter.

Tammy was dead. For good this time.

Panic spread throughout us. I contemplated fleeing Alleluia, but found that the uninfected had put guards around the outskirts of the town – those citizens whom they were openly not afraid to lose to us. Meanwhile, more and more began to mysteriously disappear. We began to stay up at night, watching and waiting, looking to see where the uninfected were taking us, and where to.

I caught a firsthand glimpse of the abduction, when they came to take my father. When he refused to comply, he was told he could be killed. The kidnapper waited outside for my father to come. My father hung his head, looked at me with sad eyes and told me not to follow him. That he would be all right.

I met with him another year later, when I learned he had survived after being brought to the tower. The infected were being forced into the chambers in the wall, and stored there like lifeless sacks of meat until they perished. The Prayer Tower, as it was called, was now the center of activity in Alleluia. Bodies continually rushed in and out; one of them, eventually, was me.

I entered Prayer Tower cowering in fear – I didn’t bother counting my age anymore, so I assumed I was twenty-six or so, perhaps still younger. The guards, wearing protective suits that prevented the spread of infection, forcefully lead my up the spiral staircase. I saw my fellow Alleluians in chains, sealed inside the chambers in the walls, doomed to perish here by the council’s word. This was how they planned to get rid of us – a massive quarantine chamber, an above ground catacomb.

Now it was our screams that shook Alleluia, the moans of the dead. We were given no food, no water, and it still took some of us weeks, months, years to die. We were not allowed to talk to one another in the catacombs, but this wasn’t properly enforced; we would converse when nobody was around, and through this heard that there were still cases of people on the outside returning from death. Whenever one of these stories would spread, we would see in a week or so another body come in and be stuffed into a hole in the wall above us.

I began to wonder when there would be nobody left to bring into the catacombs. Then everybody would be dead – there would be none left on the outside. If there were a few civilians astray, they would take advantage of the situation and escape from Alleluia, leaving their prayers for humanity behind them. Meanwhile those of us here remained locked inside – there was no way to escape the Tower. We were barred in, locked in. The Tower filled and emptied, filled, emptied again, and yet I still would not perish. I never saw my father die, but I heard his groan when he did – I was sure it was him. I was also positive my mother had finally caught this horrid disease and gotten herself locked in here, too. She, now, is dead with the rest of them.

Alleluia dwindled away in his fashion. My body refused to whither, but I prayed every day that the bacteria would relinquish me to Death’s pull. I remained there until one day, I do not know how long it had been, a firearm struck the side of Prayer Tower on my cell. I was inspired to attempt to break the stone and escape to the outside. I would fall as many stories as it took to either meet Death face to face, or escape to live out my days in relative peace in what I assumed would be the ruins of Alleluia. I began to tunnel. Not knowing when was day and when was night, I trudged onward with my task unnoticed – my actions were quiet, diligent, and even stealthy. I made sure no guard ever saw me digging through the stone. Eventually, no guards came. I could have been years – I saw no guards. Eventually, all of the groans and moans of the dying stopped. I was alone.

I broke free of Prayer Tower not even a year ago, to the ruins that now make up what was once a great city. I fell one hundred feet to the soft, mud-caked ground and slipped into death sleep for God knows how long, and then awoke and explored. I built myself a small home, which I have yet to properly utilize, and carved Tammy’s name upon its wood frame in remembrance of my fond companion. Nothing was left – all that stood was the lighthouse – almost as tall as Prayer Tower – the bridge, the playground, the woods, and Prayer Tower. No homes in sight. Alleluia was an abandoned wasteland, I its sole survivor. I broke down and cried; time was irrelevant to me now; I transcended time, death, and the world. I was the broken link in the chain of life. Contemplating this, I sat against the outer wall of Prayer Tower, sobbing, wishing to set myself free, but unable to muster the courage to do so. Waves rocked against the shore beyond the Tower, mimicking the never ending pulse in my heart. I felt two hundred, I was sure that I was over fifty, but did not look a day above twenty.

Prayer Tower had begun to crumble without maintenance. It seems a great many people had crawled their way out of the tower as I did, but much sooner – they were most likely captured and killed on the spot, their dead bodies then brought back into the Tower for quarantining. I was able to see inside Prayer Tower through these holes. In my sadness and rage I found a hammer lying around and smashed more holes in the cinder block walls of the Tower. I wanted to destroy it and everything it represented. No remorse.

I failed miserably. Without hope, I sat against the Tower wall once again. I have been sitting here ever since. Moss has grown on Prayer Tower. It shows its age, as I wish I did. I have learned one thing about Alleluia and its ruins now that I am free: those who pray for their survival went to Heaven in the Tower, and I, who did not, will never go to Heaven. I am condemned here, destined to sit against Prayer Tower’s walls, praying for the day that a strange outsider will come and end me – God forbid he be alive, and hate my condition as much as I do.