Jonas and the Werefish

Beads of sweat from Jonas’s forehead slid to the edge of his thick brows, and then dropped into his eyes, stinging them with the fury of ants: teeny tiny ants. With one hand, he gripped the cloth at the neck of the shirt he wore and stretched it outward, and tilted his face down so he could dab away the gritty, burning excretion. And the other hand, he kept firmly clasped onto the rusted top rung of the tall extension ladder that he’d climbed to some twenty feet off the ground.

It was sour-smelling, like old underwear, the shirt, not the sweat, but maybe the sweat too. Everything smelled different, odd, and off somehow since the visitors had crop dusted the locals, for miles, maybe worldwide, with that purplish haze crap from their crafts.

If the m’ffers were so goddamned advanced and superior, Jonas had previously reasoned to himself: one would think they had a better means of mass extermination than atomized poison, like a death ray maybe, or some kind of ultra-murderous sound wave that could split the eardrums and then skulls of me and my fellow hominid.

The US government had been trying to tell the American people that there was no such thing as “aliens” from outer space for months before their appearance. And that the hundreds of thousands of people crossing the country’s borders illegally were not “aliens” but “immigrants”.

Jonas figured that the Aliens’ “kill mist” was the secret ingredient in his perspiration, making it stink and his eyes burn like a bastard. What he hated most was the way it clung to the hairs in the beard he’d grown since he’d become the last man that he knew to be still alive on the planet. He’d thought about trimming the beard but he liked it and it pissed him off to think how much the Visitors could affect the simple things in his life... all the time.

But he didn’t have time, at the moment, to meditate upon the seemingly impotent but annoying means of his intended demise and what his own Government and the Chinese Communist Party may have had to do with it... or not. He didn’t believe that or the common notion shared by the majority of his now-extinct humankind, that the Russians did it.

There was a breach: a large strip of tin near the top of the wall that surrounded his makeshift compound got curled back like the lid of a sardine can and it needed repair. The next onslaught would begin just after sundown if the pattern held, and daylight was escaping already, faster than a bald man’s toupee in a hurricane, and darkness was drawing nigh quicker than snack food vanishes at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.

Jonas did not know why he was immune or had been so far to the Visitor’s vaporized joy juice of muerte. He was a sturdy enough guy for his height and athletic, more or less. He played baseball in college, shortstop, as a freshman, and was still in decent physical condition: and not exactly a pretty boy but ruggedly handsome by some accounts, squared jawline and dark hair and gray eyes, the rarest color. As if any of that mattered since he figured himself possibly to be not only the only living man but the only living human being left on the planet.

Yes, he’d been lucky or something so far but felt certain he would not be so favored by the teeth and claws of the hideously ugly zombie, vampire, creature, mofo bastards that seemed to be unleashed from the apocalyptic gloaming each day with the singular aspiration for butchery stitched across their leering faces if that is what they were: faces, as they struggled vehemently to penetrate his compound. He chuckled in his mind if such a thing was possible. Had civilization on Earth continued in the direction it was going, referring to these Hellspawn, or whatever they were, as zombie, vampire, creature, mofo bastards, would likely have been considered racist, sexist, elitist, privileged, or something else equally socially unacceptable.

Jonas had discovered a pipe bending apparatus along with many other useful tools, gadgets, and gizmos of survival in the junkyard, i.e. “do it yourself” compound, and was using it along with a power-grip clamp to attach a sheet of tin to the twenty-foot metal pole that stood upright and served as one of the framing posts for the fence, i.e. wall that surrounded the old auto scrapyard he’d transformed into his own personal and private fortress.

He then bolted it back to the section of the fence where it’d torn away.

It was a good strong fence, a wall, several layers thick- like the history of a city.

Tall metal, streetlamp-sized poles, eight inches in diameter had been stood upright in concrete and skinned with a chain-link cyclone fence when the place was originally constructed as a sports stadium in the 60s before it was converted some decades later into an auto salvage yard. Then, sheets of lumber had been attached to the chain-link fence on both sides and then the corrugated metal. It was more like a wall really, that separated countries, or should’ve. It would be extremely difficult to plow directly through or squeeze under. There was at least one layer of the chain-link fencing below the ground. So, the fence, i.e. wall, could really only be scaled to gain access into the compound or pass through the gate or from above. And that was the concern.

Jonas had not found it necessary to kill anybody to stake his claim on the salvage yard. Although, he did discover a couple of dead bodies and remove them- men they had been- in life. It looked like a murder-suicide: or they’d killed each other. It didn’t matter: Jonas had just dragged the corpses out of the compound and left them to the elements and the creatures. It was a safe place to be: his auto salvage yard compound under the circumstances: i.e. everything seemed to want to kill him. He found and scavenged many items in the salvage yard that were useful to his survival. There was no food, of course: that was a separate issue.

The mend in the fence still seemed weak to Jonas. There were more sheets of corrugated tin to be had in the yard, amongst the Chrysler fenders, Volkswagen bumpers, and mountainous stacks of rubber tires. It wouldn’t hurt to slap on another sheet…he thought.

Still standing near the top of the ladder, Jonas looked out across the landscape to see if he could spot any of the… man/hyena/monkey-faced/zombie creatures. A couple of wild, wolfish-looking, half-starved dogs skulked about at the edge of a stand of trees about fifty or sixty yards from the compound. They snarled and salivated and paced anxiously.

He removed the pistol from the holster on this hip: Second A, he’d named it being a patriotic sort, and raised it so he could look down the sites at the feral canines but decided it was a waste of ammunition to fire. He probably couldn’t hit them with this pistol anyway. It would be a lucky shot and even if he did strike and kill one of them, it was too dangerous at this hour to go retrieve the beast to cook and eat. He would probably just be providing a meal for the cur he didn’t kill. And the pair of wild dogs would slink back into the woods soon enough. Nothing was safe in these parts once the sun went down. Jonas figured the conditions to be the same everywhere... perilous… precarious... everything wanted to kill him, it seemed.

Once he was back on the ground and a couple of feet from where his ladder stood, Jonas reached down and grabbed up a piece of corroded corrugated metal that he thought might be useful as more reinforcement, and instantly pronto, on a dime, a rattlesnake sprang out from under it and sank its fangs into his right ankle just above the top of his boot. The goddamned thing didn’t even rattle like it was supposed to... just struck!

“Shit!” Jonas said and kicked his foot to throw the snake off, with no success.

He could feel the unwieldy weight of the thing affixed by its teeth just above his ankle. It was a big ass snake, a Diamondback, twisting and flopping around, probably six feet long with its curved fangs sunk in good. Jonas had to unsheathe his hunting knife and sever the head off the writhing thing, then pry its jaws open with the tip of his blade before he could finally un-latch it from his calf.

He looked upward. Dusk had already, just in the past few minutes, begun spreading… like a stain across the sky. The patch he’d made in the fence would have to do… for now.

Jonas removed his belt and tightened it around his leg just above the knee: he understood that a tourniquet is basically ineffectual but didn’t see how it could hurt. Being a Southern Boy, he knew something about rattlesnakes and their bites. He knew that the Western Diamondback was one of the largest venomous snakes in North America and caused more deaths than any other species because they are excitable and aggressive, not because their venom is so poisonous. He also understood that cutting the bite enough so it could free bleed wouldn’t really help either, or sucking out the poison or freezing the wound. He knew that without antivenin, he would either live or die; unless it was a dry bite- one with no venom.

“Yeah…right!” he said aloud to himself. “Good luck with that!”

Jonas dragged the snake behind him like a rope in the dirt as he hobbled to his trailer but then lifted it several inches above ground level so he didn’t smear the steps with the critter’s blood and then the carpet inside once he entered.

Somebody had contributed the small mobile to his compound before he found and staked his claim: most likely the previous proprietor or proprietors whom Jonas found murdered or suicided. There were two of them, men they had been in life, but already skeletonized when he lucked upon the place so he didn’t have to kill anybody or take the domicile by force. The roof was good and the plumbing and electric worked. For some reason, there was still electricity from the nearby power plant.

The big-ass, headless snake coiled itself haphazardly either from muscle memory or by chance when he tossed it into the stainless steel kitchen sink. Jonas intended to gut, skin, cook and eat the Diamondback but had not completely thought his situation through: he needed to provide himself medical attention first. And since he had never before used antivenin on himself or anyone, he really didn’t know what he was getting into. He knew it was not guaranteed to work and he could react to it badly.

He held the refrigerator door open and looked down at the little vial in his hand and read the label: “Antivenin” it said. “(Crotalidae) Polyvalent (North and South American Snakebite Antiserum)” AVOID EXCESSIVE HEAT AND FREEZING”

Jonas had acquired the stuff from the abandoned hospital he’d pillaged for medicine and supplies a couple of months past when he’d gone to town. He assumed the antivenin was still good- didn’t see an expiration date on the label if there was one. He could discern that one dosage was ten milliliters, to be injected, and he had syringes he’d also taken. But he didn’t know whether to inject himself directly into a vein or in the muscle.

His calf was beginning to hurt like a mother fucker. Maybe he was allergic.

Jonas stabbed the tip of the needle through the rubber gasket on top of the little vial and sucked up ten milliliters of the stuff. He then raised a fifth of whisky to his lips and took a long drink of the caustic amber liquid...’til his throat could no longer tolerate the burn... then he plunged the hypodermic needle into the vein in the crook of his left arm, shooting himself up with the snakebite serum.

It burned like a bitch and almost immediately he began to sweat and his back ache.

Yep! He was certain of it. He was about to die. He grabbed a beer out of the fridge and took another blast of whiskey and walked back to the living room and flopped down on the couch. His breathing came difficult. He trembled.

“I’m the last man on the planet...” he said aloud. “And I’m about to die.”

He looked across the room at the CB Radio sitting on a table near the window. He considered getting up and crossing the floor to make a desperate call for help. But in all the times he’d attempted to make contact with someone, anyone, using the radio, there never seemed to be another single soul out there… in the world.

His vision blurred and the room went out of focus and grew darker. He took another deep draw of the scorching hooch and washed it down with another huge swallow of the cold beer. He let his head fall back and rest on the cushion of the couch. He stared up at the ceiling.

Will I be missed? He thought. How could I? There is no one around to miss me.

“Cara…” he said aloud. She’s gone… he thought. “In the first… wave…” he mumbled.

He did not understand why he was not killed like Cara and their unborn son but survived… Why he was the only one … it seemed. Or how, even if he was immune to the purple haze that had been disseminated out the tailpipes of the extraterrestrials’ flying saucers, his life was built upon his love for her, them, and he’d come to realize more lately... around others.

His coherent thoughts began to dissolve into mental gibberish.

“The chances of dying from the bite of a legless reptile are about one in one thousand…” he mumbled in a somewhat sarcastic tone… something he had read on the internet before it’d stopped. “That’s… good… news… for the… nine hundred and ninety-nine…” he said… aloud.

“I wonder if Jesus knew,” he muttered. “He must’ve... he was in solitude after all, surrounded by the masses... alone in the desert... and refused to be bitten even when he was starving...”

His eyelids grew heavy and his vision blurred.“Oh Absalom, Absalom!” he muttered.