Word Count: 66,701

 

One by one, the teachers in the schoolhouse vanished. All but one succumbed to Athan’s, and I treated them. But I was afraid that my treatments were not working at all. The children perished under Athan’s. The only people who did not die, it seemed, were the doctors in the hospitals, and a few special villagers who seemed to be immune. I noticed that there was always at least one person at the top of the mountain, watching over the pile of the dead. That person would also be there when somebody woke up. When a person woke up, they were supposed to first be treated mentally and told what had happened, and then be rushed back to the hospital in Westendorf to be treated physically. The few surviving citizens of Westendorf did not seem to comprehend the situation, though I believed that nobody ever really did. They thought that those dead people remained dead forever. They cried and lamented the losses, while I stood indifferent to every one of them. I did not care who died, for I knew every single one would awaken eventually. They would wake up just like Shane, and Victor, and Kasten, and the warehouse worker, and Doradwe, and the husband, and all of the other victims of Athan’s Disease. Soon the list of the living would so large that I would no longer be able to recite it back to myself.

But the husband would not succumb to my gazes. He had no shame. He continually let dead bodies travel up the mountain. He worked with the hospital to ensure that all Athan’s patients were carried away swiftly. I suppose that they all hoped nobody would ever return to the village to cause such destruction once again. They were horribly wrong. Those citizens would rise again. I knew it. I could feel it, that one of them would get up and start walking around any day now.

All of them remained dead much longer than I expected them to. I expected that after the week had ended at least one person would wake up. It took a full two weeks, and I still did not believe that any person’s awakening was due to the medicine, but due to Athan’s natural progression and tendency to wake the person from death. Reportedly, that person lived just long enough to make it down the mountain, before being shot multiple times in the chest. The man who shot them was none other than the booth worker, under orders from the hospital. I paid a visit to the owner of the hospital after that; I couldn’t imagine anybody in Westendorf purposefully instigating a murderous code of ethics.

He lit a smoke and turned around in his desk. “Yeah, what do you want?” The friendly figure I once knew seemed to be gone. He was once cheery, but now his face was grim, and half-hidden by smoke from his cigarette.

My face was pale, but I knew I looked confident. “Tell me, why was one man shot today on the ski lift parking lot by an employee with strong ties to you?”

He laughed. “Because I told him to.” Dipped his cigarette in an ashtray and left it there. Picked up another smoke, lit it, and repeated the process. The room stunk of his cigarettes.

“Why in God’s name would you have him kill a man?” I moved a step closer to his desk, where he menacingly sat and planned his next sentences, laying around with the words in his head until the perfect words formed to describe exactly what he wanted me to know.

“Hemmings, even before you came I’d decided what I was going to do about these patients. I decided that I’d give them all the same treatment that I have that damned ticket booth man. Get them out of Westendorf. That’s what needed to happen. And if any of them tried to work their way back into Westendorf, don’t let them. Because I’ll have you know, this place is far too nice to be ruined by a bunch of sick people running around, especially ones with strange as hell diseases like that one. It doesn’t even have a name. You want to pick the name? I’ll let you.

Truth is, those guys aren’t human. I’m scared to death of them. Why should normal citizens live in fear of those deranged sub-humans? Nobody in our peaceful town should have to, that’s what. I’m working with the surviving legislature right now to make a legal document banning those with this weird sickness from the town. Not that they’d care if the law in enacted anyway, since most of them are dead. I expect most of them will stay that way for quite some time.”

“You’re wrong. They’ll all be up soon.”

“Well then, sparks will fly won’t they?” he took his legs, crossed them and lifted them up onto his desk, reclined. Snuffed out another cigarette, lit another one at the same time. Turned his head toward the ceiling and huffed out a puff of disgusting smelling smoke. Where had the cheery fellow of two weeks ago gone? This man hardly resembled the one I had met earlier on. “You know, I’m glad that you were sent here. You’re the best thing that could have happened to this place. Don’t let this whole situation get you down, Hemmings. I’m sure if any of those cursed crazies wake up they’ll form their own isolated society somewhere else in the mountains, where they’ll never bother us normal folk. We don’t need the stress of their sickness. We don’t need to be reminded that inhuman, ungodly monsters walk among us every day. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I was ready to enact his law upon him – all “ungodly monsters” should be exiled from the city and terminated? What a perfect premise to get him out of the town. I stepped forward with a clenched fist. “You’re the only monster around here.”

“Really?” he said, knowing that I’d say something to that effect. “I’d say that the world disagrees with you.” He pointed to the corner of the room behind me, where a TV had been softly playing the news. Up until that point I hadn’t noticed it playing; its hum was soft, quiet, and almost unnoticeable. The glow of the TV was dim, but had kept the room mildly lit along with a single lamp on the owner’s desk, which he had kicked around with his feet several times while speaking to me through his clouds of smoke. On that TV were reports of Athan’s cases around the world – but more importantly, reports of cities dealing with the problem of the dead coming back to life. It was not a pretty site.

It seemed that most villages assumed that the revived were ghosts, evil spirits, or some sort of spawn of the Satan himself come back to reap them. They immediately acted on these patients by thinking of the most gruesome ways of disposing of them. So, once a person had died, they might wake up to find themselves completely intact and well. A day or so later, they might find themselves being burned. It was the Salem Witch Trials all over again, but now it was global. The world simply wasn’t ready to see the circle of life so violently disobeyed – and such widespread disobedience of the omnipotent rules that stated that once a man died, he stayed dead. The treasure that mankind had lusted after for so long was finally within everybody’s grasp, and they shunned it for the most logical reason nobody had ever thought of before: it was not natural.

After several minutes of watching reawakened people in horrible agony, I shut the set off. This was a disaster, a worldwide calamity. And the man just ten feet from me was participating in it and helping the effort along. He’d been doing it long before I arrived in Westendorf, and he would continue doing it while I was there, right from beneath me, unless I did something in those moments to stop him. But I could think of nothing to do. I could not stop him. I couldn’t shut down the hospital, and I couldn’t talk to the local government. I had no power, and I lacked the courage to kill any man – because that would defeat the purpose of what I was truly fighting for; the right for every person to live. Even if they were doomed to live seemingly forever by the hands of Athan’s.

“Now that you’ve seen that ugly little sight,” he began, snuffing out the last cigarette from the box in his pocket, “what will you do? Will you wait for those cursed humans to spawn again and help me rid this town of them, or will you take their side and be cast out of this Westendorf with them?”

“There are no ‘sides’ here, sir! You’re fighting a one-sided war. They just want to live peacefully after waking up. They’ll want to get back to their families—”

“If they wake up,” he interrupted.

“Yes, of course if they wake up. They will wake up. But they’ll want to see their families, get back to a normal daily life. You’re unnecessarily destroying the lives of hundreds of people. You’ve even ordered the murder of a man. You could be arrested this minute, and your hospital shut down. I can’t see why I shouldn’t call the police to arrest you on the charge of premeditated assault and murder.”

“Well, tell me, Mr. Hemmings…” he began, reaching into a drawer of his desk after putting his feet down in order to grab some sort of piece of paper, “…how can you kill a man who has already died?” He waves the piece of paper in the air, making a noise as disgusting as the smell from his cigarette smoke. It was the murdered man’s death certificate, from when he’d perished in the hospital.

“You’re despicable. If anyone here isn’t human, it’s you.” I knew I couldn’t fight him, and there was certainly no convincing him that exiling all the ill was no answer to his problems, especially since I’d given them my antibiotic and they might be cured some day. But it seemed like my treatments weren’t working. I wanted to go back to Pharand to run a test on an actual human sick with Athan’s Disease, but I knew I had no time, just as I’d had no time when I arrived in Westendorf. I quit arguing with the owner of the hospital; there was no point to it, and I knew that I could not fix Westendorf’s greater problems, although I wished I could.

I wasn’t sure if that man’s death certificate would have any worth in a case against the owner. If it was over the news that the dead were respawning then there might be a fighting chance. But I still felt that the world didn’t understand Athan’s. They never would, and so a normal human would always see a death certificate and a death certificate, and that once a man died he remained dead, for all eternity. Even if that same man stood alive next to them, they would shout that he was dead. “Oh, he is dead!” they would cry, “Why is he here? Take him away this instant and bury him! Make sure he never returns! The death certificate must not be wrong.”

The hospital was empty beyond the owner’s office. Everybody was hiding in their own rooms. Outside, it was still raining. The sky was dark – it was night. Some street lights were lit, but most had burnt out some time ago, earlier in the week. Those who were supposed to maintain them had died long ago. Westendorf had become a remote jungle of empty buildings and sidewalks, with only the few survivors – perhaps one-sixth of the town – still hanging around, praying for their own safety. Out of the blue, who I thought was the last surviving of the school teachers ran outside and approached me. “You!” he shouted. “This is all your fault! Where has everybody been taken to? What have you done with them? Tell me now!” I saw that he was clutching something. I was praying that the man wasn’t crazy enough to have his hands on a gun.

He was.

“Back off,” I told him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Not until you tell me where everyone is. I have watched this whole town go into the pits these last few weeks, and I will not be the next to fall into that pit. Ever since you came here things have only gotten worse. We were fine without you. Once you arrived, everybody became scared that the insane local hospital was planning something outrageous. The teachers could not even teach out of fear that we were being spied upon. You have seen us, I take it. You are not responding to what I’m saying.”

My eye brow wasn’t even raised. The man had a point. Was I just a pawn of the hospital the entire time? “I was never intended to be any such thing, I assure you… especially not a spy for the hospital. What the heck were they looking to do to you guys anyway?”

“That crazy man who owns the hospital was taking our sick and sending them away. When one girl fell sick two months ago, he sent her away and she never returned. I heard she died, but others say she was alive! How could he do that – send a helpless girl away like that? Everybody else was told that she was being buried, but it was not in the family graves… and her parents supposedly agreed to it! It was too strange. Now I think her parents were with the hospital men as well, just as you are. You are here to take all of our living and pile them with our dead.”

He clutched the gun more tightly at his side, and began to crouch as though he wanted to shoot it in a stealthy manner. I could see he had no prior experience handling a gun and was absolutely terrified to even be touching such an instrument of death. He shivered, though I stood still. I stood still because I was probably more terrified than he was – out in the rain and darkness I knew he couldn’t see very well. If he shot, he would either hit me sloppily, or hit an innocent bystander, God forbid that anybody but he and I were on the streets at night. My vision of Westendorf waking in the night turned out a falsehood. Nobody came outside, ever, especially when five-sixths of its inhabitants were currently indisposed at the top of a mountain.

“And when the husband of one of the nurses died, he took that body away, too. He, too, was said to be dead. But now he works the ticket booth at the ski lift. He still works there! I have seen you conversing with him. He never enters the town, because he was sent away. We all hated him, to see him alive again, but we hated him more when he was gone because he was not allowed back. Now everybody is gone. Why do you want everybody gone, sir? Answer me!”

I shivered for the first time, but shook out a response. Among those frantic vibrations of my body, one or two managed to make it to the vocal cords. “I’m trying to tell you that I was here to give you the medicine—”

“Yes, I know. The medicine to keep us all dead!”

The vibrations ceased entering my vocal cords. What medicine had I given them? Surely it was the same medicine I had developed at Pharand off of the Emeticillin and the two workers’ project. It looked the same – and I had given it to everybody. What if this man was right? Was that the owner’s way of dealing with the problem? By replacing my antibiotic with a powerful, permanent anesthetic? I wanted to throttle that man now more than ever if such was true.

“My job was to heal you people, and save you all from this disease! I was sent here by a large pharmaceutical company to introduce to you my own antibiotic creation that would save you.”

“But it has not worked. They are all dead and taken away.”

“If it hasn’t worked, then those dead people will be back, and they will try to get back into town.”

“Then we will get rid of them. We do not want them back if they have spawned.”

“Spawned?”

“When they come back, they are the Spawn of the Devil. They have spawned.” The man loosened his grip on the gun, and eventually let go. As we continued talking, he saw me as less of a threat, but I could see he was still prepared to shoot me at a moment’s notice. I, however, was not ready to accept the fatal bullet. I had much more work to do.

“Please leave me alone now. You’ve calmed down. Get out of here and go back to your home, where you’re safe.”

“Tell me where they are before I do.”

“They are all on the top of that mountain. They’re all dead, amalgamated into a single pile of dead bodies. Guards stand at watch, I believe, waiting for the dead to reawaken. As far as I know, they’ve been ordered to kill the newly reawakened dead on site, in order to prevent them from reentering Westendorf.” I was shivering again. His hand was moving back to the gun. He was thinking once again that I was responsible, because I knew so much. But I knew this much because I was nosy, not because I was in cahoots with the owner of that godforsaken hospital.

“Why do they come back?” the teacher asked, his voice quivering with a tremendous tremolo. “What causes this? It is the most ungodly thing I have ever seen in my life… I am scared, sir, so very scared. I do not want to die. And I do not want to return after death.”

“I can’t comfort you. Just don’t get sick. If you have to, get out of this town. I don’t know how safe you’ll be. You’ve seen the news. It’s everywhere. But you’re better off being anywhere else but here. Get out, if you’re willing.”

I never saw the man again. Not in the schoolhouse, not in any house, and certainly nowhere near the hospital. He had taken my advice and fled Westendorf – gone deep into the mountains and never looked back once. I never knew if he caught Athan’s. If he did, he is now living his own nightmare – trapped in a near endless life, outside of the natural circle and order of the universe. He is an anomaly to Mother Nature and Father Time, who cannot comprehend his continual existence or the continual existences of the global population sick to undeath with Athan’s Disease. They are all horribly alone, because not a soul but themselves can even attempt to understand their condition. And even though everybody with Athan’s might have the same sickness, they never understand each other – because they hardly understand themselves, and what has become of them. They can only understand what others are doing to them, because they, unlike Dr. Doradwe’s secret society, have not lived long enough to know the true effect of the disease on the human body.