The Grief Chamber

Behrs stood on the terrace of the Hemzol Emergency Center and looked at the city laid out before him. Tent colonies spread over miles and miles meeting the skyscrapers of downtown Hemzol that dominated the horizon. A few birds and drones flew over the tents, all grey and indistinguishable from the other. Everything was touched with gloom and a profound air of utter despair.

He lit a cigarette and let it transport him momentarily. Then he pulled out the binoculars from his backpack and peered at the towers in the distance. Small long figures seemed to fall out of the sky near the buildings and headlong into the earth. About ten or twelve each time; some days even more. He knew what they were and his heart sank. He worried one day it would turn to stone and he would ignore it like the others.

He looked at his watch. Ten minutes of his lunch break remaining. A faint hiss rose in the background and became a shrill hum. He did not turn to see. Seconds later six MedPods flew in the direction of the city diminishing among the high-rises. In a few hours, as usual, they would be back with bodies. He stubbed out the cigarette and made his way back down into the wide halls of the busy hospital. He sanitized the last stretch of the corridor by the ER, programmed the AutoSweep robot to wipe the floors and collect equipment to return to storage, before clocking out. It was an easy day, he thought, as he waited inside the parking structure for the Romelon 3 to arrive. He lit another cigarette. The phone chimed.

A message: PUT ON YOUR FILTER GAUGE NOW.

At that, he pulled out the BioMask and placed it over his nose, locking the filters around it. Another message displayed the air toxicity levels outside the air-conditioned area of the garage. It remained at 82 percent, not changing for the last six days. He definitely needed the mask. Soon the Romelon 3 arrived and halted before him. A polished beast of black chrome with no windows, the vehicle let out a pulse of air as the two side panels parted and a TetraFoam seat emerged suspended on an extender. Behrs sat in it and pressed a blue button. The seat pulled back into the car and he was on his way.

At home, the worries of the day did not leave him. The desperation of the city lay over him like a watchful ghost. He made a tasteless dinner and washed it down with grape soda. Outside, thousands will go hungry tonight, he thought ruefully. He opened a frayed paperback - a sci-fi from a long-forgotten writer who now lived amongst the destitute of the tent cities and managed to write a few tales, on a barely functioning Netbook, in between shifts running coke and meth to make ends meet. Once or twice a month, Behrs dropped in to purchase a few cheaply made paperback copies of the man’s works but these days he was not writing any so Behrs reread the old ones. While he read, the city of Hemzol burned and screamed, its starving residents scurrying about enraged, like cursed nocturnal animals.

When he woke up he sat on the bed for a long time. The paperback lay on his chest and the soft whispery alarm of the digital projection timer was dying out in phases. He rubbed his eyes, announced ‘HOME MODE OFF’ and then in a flicker he was back inside the Romelon 3, looking out through the touchscreen glass panels on the passenger side. A man’s face was being pushed down on the panel from the outside and he was screaming soundlessly for Behrs’s vehicle was currently set to the soundproof mode and he could not hear him. The sight did not unnerve him and he watched, anguish and anger rising slowly, as the other man who held the victim brought out a large kitchen knife and plunged it into the cheeks of the screaming man. He whimpered with quick spurts of blood trickling down the glass panel.

‘CLOSE EXTERIOR VIEW’ Behrs told the vehicle. And it was dark again. He wondered if he should move to a different spot to get away from the everyday violence of the tent cities but he could not think of any other place. Everywhere was the same in Hemzol. Not that it really mattered since Romelon 3 came with a sort of invisibility cloak feature that enabled Behrs to hide the car from view wherever he was parked and the car’s shockproof and bulletproof frame prevented any physical damage but people occasionally bumped into it and in the case of the screaming man, the car was being used as a wall to commit murder on.

By late afternoon Behrs was cruising through downtown. He looked up and saw the people falling from the towers. There were too many today, all of them determined to escape the cruelties of this world and find solace in another. They tore through the air gracefully and with a mysterious calm about their form until the body hit the pavement and splattered into a bubbling pulp of red, pink and black. He tried his best to swerve away from the landing spots but blood and brain matter managed to taint the glass panels of his car, nevertheless. At the corner of an old Chinese hole-in-the-wall takeout, he stopped the Romelon, peeking into the shadowy interiors of the joint. Nothing. And there will be nothing in the foreseeable future because the family of four that ran the place disappeared years ago and someone told him about a Chinese restaurant owner who jumped off the Cradent Towers with his family last summer. He hoped there was no connection but there could be and he thought frequently about it and occasionally returned to see if the family had come home after all. Four MedPods buzzed through the air and a prescient patina of death and cries fell over Hemzol as the sun went down. From inside the safety of the Romelon, Behrs, vigilant and tormented, watched, waiting for he did not know what.

It was almost night when he opened his eyes. The glass panels were still active and a faint bluish light filtered into the car. Outside, a lazy wind circled paper and dust near the Chinese restaurant. No sign of people. A street dog peered at the vehicle and scampered away. Behrs rubbed some water over his eyes. An insidious headache took shape as a flicker of nausea passed over him before he blacked out for a second and came back. He thought about his three-year old son and a wife who left him seven years ago after he went to rehab and by the time he walked out, she had found someone else - a rich investment banker called Zemeris Borg. A few weeks after marrying Zemeris, the wife, holding their son, leapt off the 22nd floor of the Riviera West Hotel where she was honeymooning. Behrs lost his family for the second and final time that day.

He started the car and dictated directions for Freedom Square which lay twelve miles to the east and then sat back with eyes shut, and the glass panels closed, for the 20-minute ride. Once there, he parked the car in the center of the field and waited for the perpetual fog of dust to peter out. A sea of mangled bodies came into view. Just a few yards away, dogs were tearing out the tongue of a child that lay rotting, grotesque oversized crows hopped over empty beer cans and wet grocery bags, somewhere a man shouted obscenities and then the sound of gunshots followed. In the distance, an old decrepit woman, nude, squatted over a newspaper, was digging a hand into her buttocks and eating feces, her eyes distant and unblinking, hair matted with dried blood. She looked in the direction of the Romelon and seemed to stare at Behrs but he knew he was invisible to her and so returned the gaze. It chilled him to see her like that. Soon a man with a gun appeared out of the swirling dust and shot the woman on the back of the head sending shards of skull and body waste into the air. The man stood there for a moment, gun smoking, an unworldly ferocity in his eyes, looking in the direction of the Romelon. Moments later, the left side of his head sputtered blood and he collapsed with eyes open, witness to the dying age of the world. Somewhere a sniper rejoiced this clean kill.

Behrs was suddenly thirsty and drank from the plastic bottle by his side. Any hunger pangs he had were now gone. His head throbbed, eyes started to itch and water. He closed them for a moment and took slow calming breaths. The only sound inside the car was the quiet hum of the air-conditioner.

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Copyright © 2021 Mizanur Rahman.

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Published by Mizanur Rahman, in the United States of America.