The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) Read online

The next day, Elaine added, “Jimbo was only able to break the Block Slasher’s code after reading a copy of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s old notebooks. The Slasher was a huge fan of everything to do with the Renaissance.”

  Morgan dabbed Cindy’s lips with a wet cloth to keep them from cracking. “Cindy was in the process of getting her own sitcom before the networks closed their doors. They had just gotten done filming the pilot for her show and then the whole network shut down.”

  “Life’s a bitch,” Elaine said, approving of the C-level celebrity in their midst.

  Each Block was given a name and a story, and every time they walked the rows of beds, each story was developed a little more. Day after day went by with the two of them adding a bit here and a piece there to each life in the cots around them. Eventually, Morgan and Elaine could recite each person’s entire biography. And in that way, random bodies became valued members of society.

  The following week, Elaine had called over to Morgan: “Jimbo said we’re lucky he’s not still on the job. He’s sure there’s more than one killer lying somewhere in the cots around us.”

  She’s not serious, is she? Morgan thought. We’re going to put words in their mouths now?

  But she gave in because it would ruin Elaine’s day, and maybe every day they had spent creating these fictitious lives together, if she stopped playing along now. She knew there had to be a reason for Elaine to develop this game all of a sudden, to provide something in their lives that was missing, she just didn’t know what it was.

  “Cindy says you’re not welcome at her comedy shows. She’s trying to make people laugh, not kill themselves.”

  “Ha!” Elaine called out, satisfied.

  To this day, they still add thoughts and words to each body. And with the stories, with the dialogues they created on behalf of the people that couldn’t talk for themselves, Morgan finds herself thinking of each body around her as an actual person, rather than a shell of a person. Even when Elaine doesn’t yell across the gym to add another detail to a Block’s life or relay what the Block just said, Morgan finds herself thinking of the things each Block might say. She passes one, known for being gruff, and frowns at his comment that she should stand upright and have better posture. Then she passes a Block known for being happy-go-lucky, and smiles at the comment that the prettiest daylight always follows storm clouds.

  Under her breath, she says, “Yes, that’s true.”

  Maybe that is what Elaine intended the entire time, that they would start to think of themselves as part of a group again. Without her friend’s game, Morgan could envision herself resenting the daily allotment of chores. When you are old and weak, it takes all the energy you have to care for others. If the rows of anonymous bodies she cleans and feeds could have been swapped out for any other collection of nameless bodies, she might become irritated with her situation. Giving each Block a unique life, giving them personalities, carrying on conversations with them, makes each body a special addition to the facility. Instead of being burdened by an assortment of mannequins she is surrounded by some of the world’s most interesting people, people she just happens to be caring for.

  “Cindy wants to know if you’ve heard the one about the Block, the priest, and the rabbi,” she says.

  But Elaine doesn’t answer. Morgan sees her friend leaning over one of the Block’s beds with her head down.

  “Your forehead is on fire,” she says when she gets there and puts a hand to Elaine’s face. “You need to lie down.”

  The next day, Elaine seems healthy again. But the following week, she is ill for three days in a row. The next week, she is bedridden for all but one day.

  “Is this what it’s like to grow old?” Elaine says. “I’m tired of being sick.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Morgan says. “You’re just pushing yourself too hard.”

  Even as she says it, though, her eyes dart all over the room. First, at all of the bodies waiting for care. Then at the computer and her one method of communicating with the outside world. Then at the emergency exit and the place she last saw George. Her eyes bounce all over the place, back and forth, like a terrified dog’s, until Elaine squeezes her hand.

  “What do you think Cindy has to say about me right now?” she asks.

  But Morgan can’t focus on the game. “You’ll be fine,” she says again. “You have to be.”

  Elaine looks around the room at all the people who are dependent on their care, then returns her eyes to gaze at Morgan. She opens her mouth to say something, but thinks better of it and only nods and closes her eyes.

  “You’ll be fine,” Morgan says again.

  Two days go by and Elaine seems to be slowly getting her strength back. But on the third evening, after Morgan gets done caring for the Blocks and eats her own dinner, she is shocked at what she finds. Elaine is mumbling in her sleep, but her eyes are open and worried, as if she doesn’t understand where she is. Her breathing is raspy. Her face is covered in sweat. Tiny bits of perspiration collect on each part of her face until the droplets run down onto her pillow. Her white hair, which has significantly thinned over the years, is matted together with moisture.

  Maybe, Morgan thinks, life is about the first time you tell yourself everything will be okay and the last time you are able to convince yourself of that lie.

  In the morning, when Morgan opens her eyes, she notices Elaine is still under her blanket, still breathing as if afraid she might drown. Although she is asleep, she continues to shiver and mumble.

  Morgan goes immediately to her side. “You’re sick,” she says, gently tugging on Elaine’s shoulder. “Stay in bed. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Elaine’s eyes open, but they do not focus on Morgan or on anything else, and she does not offer a reply. Her eyes close again as the shivering continues uninterrupted.

  Morgan has a quick breakfast and then begins her rounds. Halfway through, she goes to check on Elaine and sees she is no better. She finds a spare blanket and adds it to the other two already on top of her friend. The additional warmth does no good; the shivering does not stop or even become less pronounced.

  It is almost midnight by the time she is done caring for all four quadrants of Blocks.

  “You’re severely dehydrated,” she tells Elaine. “You’ve been sweating all day. You’re soaked. You need food and liquid.”

  But Elaine, in her delirium, cannot even swallow a sip of water. It dribbles out the side of her mouth as soon as Morgan pours it in, sends her friend into a coughing fit. After a quick trip to the supply closet, she pulls out a spare nutrient bag and IV, as if Elaine is suddenly a Block, and puts the needle into Elaine’s arm.

  “You’ll thank me for this later,” she tells her friend.

  The cold prick of the needle on Elaine’s arm seems to bring her out of her stupor for a moment.

  “Morgan?” she says, as if not sure where she is, or if she is awake or dreaming.

  “I’m right here. You’ll be fine. Just rest.”

  Elaine says something, but it sounds like nonsense.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I’ve been having weird dreams.”

  “You’re in Miami, in the group home. But you’ve come down with something.”

  “I’ve been having a lot of dreams,” Elaine says again.

  “You’ll be fine. Just rest.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “There’s no reason to be scared. You’ll be okay.”

  But as she says it, Morgan wonders if her friend is frightened of having more of the dreams she says she has been having, or of dying. There is no good way to ask such questions without reminding someone of their mortality, and so she says nothing.

  “I don’t want to die,” Elaine says.

  “You won’t. You’ll be fine. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Stop talking like that.”

  But then Elaine mutters a string of words that
might be full sentences, but Morgan can only make out bits and pieces: “In my dreams… at the end… they come for me in my sleep… with me… at the end… never wake up.”

  “Shhh,” Morgan soothes, pulling the blankets up to her friend’s chin. “You’ll be better in the morning, I promise. Now, rest.”

  It isn’t until she eats and brushes her teeth that she realizes it’s past midnight. The moon is already beyond the windows, where the tops of the walls meet the gym’s ceiling. The morning rounds usually begin in less than six hours. She sets her alarm to go off an hour later than normal, then closes her eyes.

  As tired as she is, it’s difficult to quiet her mind.

  What will I do if Elaine dies and I’m left to take care of everyone by myself? How can I take care of all of these people day after day?

  Her parents would scold her if they were there and knew her concerns were more about being alone than of her friend’s well-being. As sleep comes over her, she makes a mental note to e-mail Daniel, her friend in Los Angeles, and ask him how he dealt with it when he became the last caretaker there.

  And then sleeps comes.

  4

  Elaine is bedridden all of the next day. As Morgan finishes her rounds for the night, it begins raining again. Exhausted, Morgan falls onto her mattress and listens to the water hitting the metal roof. It’s the only sound she knows of that is peaceful and relaxing, yet is able to make her heart quicken and her breath stop.

  She likes the sound because it reminds her of her childhood, when she would sit on her bed with a book and watch the rain bounce off the windows. Without even asking if Morgan wanted some, her mother would appear in the doorway with hot chocolate. The entire time she sipped from the warm cup, she would hear the sound of water running off the roof into the gutters. The thought still makes her feel warm inside.

  But the sound also makes her entire body stiffen. This is because she knows it’s a matter of time until a hurricane lands directly on the city and destroys the group home. Every year, a string of hurricanes seem to miss Miami just to the east or west, never directly overhead unless it has weakened enough to be considered a tropical storm.

  If a genuine hurricane does land on top of them, the metal roof will be ripped off and thrown a mile down the road. They would all be dead in a matter of days. Without a roof, without a real shelter, she and Elaine will have to abandon the remaining Blocks to the elements and seek cover for themselves. This is something she knows she isn’t capable of doing. Instead, she would remain in what is left of the building, because that is where her wards are. (She isn’t sure, but she thinks Elaine would choose to stay there, too, even though it would mean their certain death.)

  There is a basic truth to nature that makes this choice necessary: if she lives with the Blocks when everything is okay, she shouldn’t abandon them when everything goes to hell. This is the reason marriage vows speak of the good times and the bad, through sickness and in health. If you are truly devoted to something, you don’t give up just so you can preserve yourself.

  This idea will keep her with her Blocks even as she and Elaine come down with colds, impossible to avoid without a roof, colds that, at their age, could very well be lethal. The Blocks will be sick too, of course. She will stay with them through all of this.

  For the rest, those who survive the initial wave of germs, there are the vultures. Vultures can smell death. It will only be a day or two until the first birds appear on the ledge where the roof used to be. As soon as they take count of the dead, of the sheer volume of raw meat available for pecking, they will descend. Seeing that their dinner puts up no fight, even more scavengers will appear. The animals will eat until they are fat, not caring if their meal is dead due to the storm or to sickness, or even if it is dead at all—the Block’s beating heart means nothing to a vulture.

  It would be pointless for Morgan to try and scare these creatures away. She could hobble toward them and make them scatter, but they would only fly to another corner of the shelter so many times before they realized she wasn’t a threat. It takes Morgan two minutes to walk from one quadrant to another. That’s two minutes for the vultures to find a new target and tear away chunks of flesh from helpless Blocks. And even if she made her way toward them as fast as she was able, a different group of vultures would quickly return to the spot she just left.

  “Shooo!” she would scream, sobbing as her friends had strips of skin gobbled up.

  The fight would be futile. And, to add insult to injury, it is a fight she would only be able to carry on for four or five minutes before she was too tired and light-headed and needed to sit down. She would be forced to rest on a bed in the same building with the Blocks who were being eaten alive by the scourge of the earth. If she rested for too long, if she grew weak from defending everyone else, the vultures might get her as well.

  All of this because a storm took their roof off.

  Looking back, she wonders why the blizzards of Boston and Chicago seemed scarier than the hurricanes in Miami and New Orleans. Why did people flee from one natural disaster just to flock towards another? Instead of racing south, having all of the final settlements as close to the equator as possible, there could have been a coordinated effort to have final settlements in Seattle, Chicago, or New York. Why did everyone ignore the mudslides and fires and earthquakes in California and the numerous hurricanes in Florida? Just because it was warmer? That didn’t make any sense.

  Fewer people would have been stuck on the roads if they had just stayed in the northern settlements. Fewer people would have died along the way. But she knows it goes against human nature to want to stay in places like Seattle or Boston when you see more empty houses each day. The population will eventually dwindle away everywhere—people understand this, but they move in packs anyway. Even though the same decline in population eventually occurred in Los Angeles and Miami too, the journey south made everyone feel like they were somehow outracing time.

  Time, in terms of waking up each day, is nothing more than death itself. People migrating south would still one day watch everyone they knew grow old and pass away, before they too died, but knowing you had gone in the same direction as everyone else must have offered a sense of comfort.

  She knows this because she was one of the masses that never questioned moving south. Her parents decided it was time to move and they moved. That was it.

  But now she’s in a geographic region that, for a couple of months each year, has a series of storms that threaten her destruction. And they only miss because of luck. It’s a matter of time until luck runs out and there is a direct hit. With nature, everything is a matter of time. She imagines a series of storms all lined up, all targeted at Miami. But one after another, they all veer away at the last minute, one to the east, one to the west, each one tearing away huge segments of the country in its path, flooding lands forgotten by man, all the while only giving her a barrage of rain until the winds slow and, eventually, go back to normal.

  Although there is no longer a weatherman showing storm charts on the evening news, Morgan can still view the satellite images and computer-generated storm predictions online. The satellites still track each storm and pass the information to the National Weather Service’s website. The charts show the eye of the storm as a circle and then various colored lines depicting possible projected paths, calculated by the computers, as the storm makes its way towards land.

  Each storm that misses the group home raises the chance that one will eventually not veer off, will land squarely on them. And when it does, the Block home will be torn apart. She is sure of this. And once it’s gone, the Miami settlement will vanish like all the rest.

  She thinks it miraculous that throughout all of this, throughout her current situation, she is still able to remember the thunderstorms of her childhood and the smell of her mother’s hot chocolate. Is that a sign from above that she is protected by a guardian angel? Or is it part of her nature, as a survivor, that even during the worst of times she c
an remember better moments and be comforted by them? Is it a sign that all worries are forgotten when you get to heaven, or is it nothing more than a natural instinct to reminisce when you know the end is approaching?

  Getting out of bed, she goes and checks on Elaine.

  “These storms are going to be the end of us,” her friend says in a rare moment of lucidity.

  “You just worry about getting healthy,” Morgan says. “I’ll worry about the storms.”

  Elaine begins crying then, and it’s not until she speaks that Morgan has any idea what is upsetting her: “I’m sorry you have to go through all of this by yourself. When I’m gone, please remember me as the person that was laughing with you as we made up stories about all these people. Don’t remember me like this. And please don’t be mad at me for leaving you here by yourself.”

  Morgan doesn’t know what to say to this, so, as is her custom, she regrettably says nothing at all, only holds her friend’s hand and listens to the rain as it continues to fall. The storm helps blot out the sound of Elaine’s crying.

  “Why did you start creating names and lives for all of the Blocks?” Morgan says, finally having something she thinks is worth saying to Elaine, but when she looks down, her friend is breathing softly, her eyes twitching ever so slightly. Asleep.

  She begins to stand, then thinks better of it and remains at Elaine’s side. As she watches, Elaine’s eyelids flutter ever so slightly. The corners of her mouth twitch.

  “It’s okay,” Morgan says, stroking her friend’s forehead. “I’m here. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  But her friend keeps flinching in her sleep, and after a minute Morgan stands to continue making her rounds.

  5

  Elaine will be better today; she has to be.

  That’s Morgan’s first thought when she wakes up.

  Her second is not as hopeful: Why did we spend all this time creating stories for everyone around us instead of discussing what would happen when one of us died and left the other alone?