James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

“Holy shit!” Jak breathed, sitting in the seat next to Ryan.

Ryan had seen menand womenflogged in some of the frontier pestholes, but the woman’s back was unimaginably worse than anything he’d ever seen. There were great coils of scar tissue, swollen and livid, as though she had been sprayed with some sticky acid that had made her flesh bubble into grotesque shapes. Some of the scarred lines ran down her arms, disappearing under the thin material of her gown. It was a miracle that she had survived.

“Look at sores around her mouth,” Mildred whispered to Krysty. “And her nails. An advanced stage of rad cancer. Couldn’t have been long.”

After the silent display, the woman was asked to describe what she had seen as she wandered the ruined, burning city.

She slowly and painfully hitched the kimono back into place before answering, turning again to stare deep into the blank eye of the camera.

“You will be surprised, but I was not then in great pain. My whole body felt numb. There was little life in the city. Many dead. As I moved along, the skin was peeling from my body, and it fell about my feet and tripped me so I pulled it loose where I could reach. I saw places on my arm where bone showed white through blackened flesh.”

Doc stood and pushed his way along the row, mumbling apologies. “Sorry, sorry, but I have seen enough. I have seen much more than enough, my friends. Sorry”

The woman continued inexorably on. “What I remember best and I have heard others say this There were shadows on the walls. Shadows of people. A man working on a ladder. A child throwing a ball in the air. The shadows were these people. All that remained of them, burned into the walls.”

Mildred stood, her voice strained, unnaturally high. “Think I’ll join Doc,” she said. “Sorry.”

Without a word, Krysty rose and followed her from the room, passing in front of the projector, her huge shadow cutting off the film for a moment, leaving Ryan, J.B. and Jak to watch the rest of the flickering, damaged black-and-white movie.

There wasn’t much more.

“Many bodies were melted. Puddles. You understand? Like heated wax, distorted into puddles of sticky fluids. Here and there a skull, or a row of teeth or a complete hand, oddly untouched. Corpses everywhere, and not one that could be recognized. Most were never identified. My husband, three little ones, sister, her husband and two children and my brother and his wife and both my parents. Not one was ever found. I could not mourn. There was nothing to mourn. They had ceased to exist.”

The camera had closed in, and a single tear gathered in the puckered corner of one eye, finally releasing itself and trickling down the unmarked skin of her cheek, passing the trembling side of her mouth and plopping onto her kimono.

There was a jagged crackling sound, and the film ended abruptly, leaving the bright silver rectangle of light on the screen, which vanished as the young bearded man threw a switch.

“There,” Mashashige said. “Perhaps that explains things better for you.”

Ryan tried to answer and found his mouth was too dry. He swallowed hard a couple of times. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “I guess that it does.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

When they got back to their rooms, none of them felt much like talking. And when a servant knocked on the door and asked them if they wished to come down to supper, none of them felt much like eating, either.

After the elderly woman had bowed her way out, Ryan turned to the others. “Know how you all feel. I’m the same. Idea of food makes my stomach heave. But we’re planning to leave tonight. Few hours. No idea when we might next get anything to eat or drink, so we have to go down and do the best we can.”

Doc shook his leonine head. “Forgive me, old friend, but I fear that is beyond me.”

“Me, too,” Mildred said. “No good, Ryan. You just can’t make us eat.”

Ryan sighed. “All right. I won’t make you do anything. Rest of us’ll be back here as soon as we can. At least drink plenty of water.”