Forty-Five Minutes (Short Fiction)

                 The board was like a magnet. Questioned about the unusual situation in years since, Markus Blane couldn’t recall the size of the old man’s room, the color of the walls, or even where he was in the room. All he could remember were two things: the checkered board on the table in front of him and the old man’s face. A man with minutes left to live.

                But then, that was the job.

                “They said I have about forty-five minutes left,” he said as Markus entered the room. “So come on in.”

                He was oddly calm, with kind eyes. Somewhere in his mid-eighties, perhaps. Markus had seen him before, waiting in line at the cafeteria – or the mess hall, as the guardsmen called it. This man wasn’t in the national guard, though. He was a volunteer.

                Markus sat down, coughed awkwardly, and remembered the things he had been practicing in the mirror of his tiny room, hoping to god he’d never have to say them.

                “Mr. Albright, I’m terribly so-”

                “I’m the first, right?”

                Markus froze, all the carefully prepared platitudes scattering from his anxious mind.

                The old man huffed. Not a chuckle, not a sigh. Somewhere in-between.

                “Look, I know you’re not going to be very good at this. But, frankly, I’ll be dead in an hour – so what does it matter? Treat me as practice. If what I saw in that mountain is any indication, there’ll be plenty more to follow.”

                Markus sank, but tried to maintain a professional demeanor.

                “I certainly hope that isn’t-”

                “Hope won’t clean up that mess, lives will. I don’t have time for waffling, make your move.”

                Markus, jolted to a halt once more, and looked down at the table.

                “Checkers?”

                “We don’t have time for chess, do we? Is this your idea of comfort, questioning every decision I make in my final moments? Some shrink you are.”

                Markus was about to defend himself with the fact that he was not technically a psychiatrist, but decided against it. A life in public service hadn’t been his first choice, but with things the way they were there wasn’t much choice. He moved a thin, black disk forward on the board.

                “I haven’t played checkers in years, so I apologize if I’m not much of an opponent,” he admitted.

                Another indecipherable huff.

                “I’m used to playing my grandson, so don’t worry,” the old man said, moving a red disk. “We would play every night before the networks went down.”

                Markus’ hand absentmindedly moved another piece.

                “Do you want to record a message for him? We can send it out with one of the supply convoys.”

                “Naw, I recorded one in indoc like everyone else. All pretty and rehearsed. If I do one now I’m liable to die in the middle, and I’d rather not catch that on tape. They showed us the first few they got on video, and… well, I don’t want to risk anyone I know seeing that happen to me.”

                Markus nodded. A red piece jumped over a black one. Personal details were being shared. He was on solid ground now.

                “I understand. Tell me more about your grandson.”

                “His name’s Nathaniel. No shortening, he’s very insistent. He hates Nate, so if you’re the one to tell the family be sure to remember that.”

                “I will.”

                A few more pieces moved. Markus had lost two.

                “They tried to stop me, you know.”

                “Your family?”

                “Yeah. Said I should stay in the nursing home, ride out my time. All two years I had left, thanks to my pancreas.”

                “Cancer?”

                “Yup. Been on borrowed time for a while. I’ve had to come to terms with death at least four times now. I’m well-practiced. That’s why I’m taking this so well.”

                A red piece hit the opposite side of the board, and was kinged. Markus nodded.

                “I didn’t want to bring it up, but you really are.”

                “Eh, you get all of the introspective, existential stuff out the first two times you get told you have a week to live. I’ve been okay with the idea of disappearing for a while now, so when they asked for volunteers I figured, what the heck?”

                “Disappearing?”

                Markus aimlessly moved another piece forward.

                “That’s what I figure it’s like. I’m not religious – I see the cross on your neck there, I respect you for not bringing it up – so my best guess is it’s like every time I’ve gone under for surgery. You’re there, and then you’re not. The nothing around your eyes seeps in one last time, and you just disappear.”

                The old man paused, staring at the board.

                “Huh, that was a weird move.”

                “Sorry, I didn’t really think about it.”

                “No, no, that’s fine. Not a lot of stumping opportunities in checkers. It’s interesting.”

                “So that’s why you volunteered?” Markus asked as the man made a fresh move. “Since you’re comfortable with death?”

                “Well, yeah,” he said, shrugging, “but mostly for Nathaniel. Even if I was afraid of death, I’m more afraid of him losing his shot at the world. What’s left of it, anyways.”

                “There’s still plenty left.”

                A laugh. Cold, harsh. Bitter. Pieces weren’t moving on the board anymore.

                “Son, you’re – what – twenty-eight? Fresh out of school, ready to treat patients? You are naiveté personified. Were you even alive when Lake Michigan finally fizzled out? There used to be trees in Colorado, you know. Look outside now, there’s nothing. It’s all dead. Bare, snowless mountains. I went skiing here once, as a kid. Before it all melted. Last resort in the country. Now it’s all, what? Rocks, bunkers… and bioweapon labs, I guess.”

                Markus let the rant go. He didn’t seem to be spiraling, and the man deserved to be righteously angry at least a little bit in his final moments. It was cathartic. Probably.

                “You know, they’re not even sure how the damn thing in that cave works? Apparently, the data storage and the experiment itself are in adjacent rooms. No external backups, of course. All top secret. Literally the only useful information we got in training was ‘don’t touch the vines.’ All we can do is throw bodies in there. Hack away at that godforsaken bramble until we find a thumb drive loaded with how to kill it or some shit like that.”

                A practiced nod of understanding subconsciously slipped from Markus as his subject let out an exasperated sigh.

                “Instant death on a one-hour timer,” the old man said with disbelief, looking at his own hands. “I don’t feel any different. I can barely believe it. But I guess I have to. Who were they even planning to use it against? Russia? After PIVID came out of the permafrost? Half the world got meningitis and half of that half was Russian! Or was it China? Well, whichever shard of it you call China anymore. Not that any of them have seen the U.S. as a threat since the east coast went under. Was that what this was? Our bid to get back on the rubble of the world stage? A new era of mutually assured destruction?”

                Okay, now it was spiraling.

                “Mr. Albright–”

                The old man’s eyes snapped into Markus’, cut from the middle-distance they had been lecturing. They stared at each other for a moment, equally disarmed. Each of them on entirely untread ground.

                “Call me Dave.”

                The old man’s eyes slipped back to distance with the words. He was getting overly contemplative.

                “Dave.”

                “Yes?”

                “It’s your move.”

                Dave looked at the board, picked up a red disk, and captured another one of Markus’ pieces.

                They both breathed for a moment.

                “I’m sorry,” Dave sighed.

                “You aren’t in the wrong.”

                “I know. I just… I didn’t think I’d become so cynical. You’re supposed to be mature, at my age.”

                “No you’re not. Nobody is.”

                “Some people put a pretty good show of it on, though.”

                Markus laughed softly.

                “Yes, that’s true.”

                He thought about his move, briefly, and tried to set himself up to capture one of Dave’s red disks.

                “A-hah,” the old man blurted wryly. “Now you’re playing for real.”

                “It’s coming back to me.”

                Another sigh.

                “I think I’m just numb to mourning.”

                “Have you had a lot of loss?”

                A snort.

                “Haven’t we all? A nation, heck – a planet.”

                “Sure. But people don’t generally identify with grand-scale losses like that. That was the whole problem, after all.”

                “Sure,” Dave shrugged.

                “So, any personal loss?”

                The eyes slipped distant again. He sat back in his chair, a red disk pinched absently between his fingers.

                “A wife. Two kids out of three. A few close friends. Parents. Nothing most people haven’t lost.”

                “It’s still loss.”

                “I suppose. I wonder when I got used to it.”

                They played a few more moves.

                “You lost anyone?”

                Markus hesitated. Soliciting personal anecdotes was typically an attempt to deflect. You weren’t supposed to share. But, then, you couldn’t really deflect imminent death.

                “Uh, yeah. My parents. My sister. PIVID.”

                “Eesh, that sucks. You must have been pretty young, too.”

                “I was eight. I got it too, but survived. My brother’s still on ventilation.”

                “Fifteen years on a ventilator?”

                “Yup. He hasn’t left his house in half a decade.”

                The old man’s eyebrows raised in reluctant acknowledgement of the horror contained in that one sentence. Markus had seen the reaction before. It was a fairly common one. People don’t really have a ready response to a bomb like that.

                “I suppose I’m pretty lucky, then,” the dying man said.

                “Doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be upset by what’s happened to you.”

                “Damnit, I know that.”

                He placed his piece back on the board, in a new position. However Markus moved, he’d lose at least two pieces. It was a good play.

                “I guess I’ve just got no gas left in the upset engine. Heck, I volunteered to a near-guaranteed death sentence. I’m good. I’m ready to go.”

                Markus nodded, his heart in it this time. He understood being burnt out.

                “How do you handle it?”

                “What, you’re looking for advice?”

                Markus shrugged. Normally, a question like that was used prompt the subject to self-investigate. But now…

                “The exhaustion? I don’t know, it’s not something you really handle. It just… weighs on you. If you’re asking, you know. Your move, by the way. You’re up shit creek either way, just pick one already.”

                Markus finally moved, sacrificing the inevitable two pieces. The old man stared at the board for a moment, but didn’t play. He looked up at Markus.

                “Don’t they teach you how to handle that kind of thing at whatever school you went to?”

                “They teach us the patterns of coping with trauma, but it’s clinical,” Markus admitted. “I can recognize when something’s causing negative thoughts, but that doesn’t mean I can instantly fix it. I haven’t spoken to my brother in a year. There’s no cure for human struggle, just treatments.”

                “God, I wish I’d known that before my last twenty minutes.”

                The two men stared at each other for half a heartbeat, and then laughed. They laughed for a while. It felt good. Whatever tension was in the room snapped, then.

                “See, I told you I’d be good practice,” Dave said, chuckling.

                Markus wiped a tear from his eye.

                “I suppose you were right. I feel better about myself, now. Thanks for that.”

                “I’ll bet you were shitting yourself, eh?”

                More laughter.

                “It was a hell of a job description,” Markus said mirthfully, “‘Take care of dying volunteers in a disaster cleanup effort during their final hour’ wasn’t the most appealing pitch.”

                “Why the hell did you take it? Call of duty?”

                “God, no,” they were still speaking through softening laughter. “I went to school for duty, but you try finding a job in a slow burning apocalypse. The National Guard greenlit hiring five new counselors for the cleanup effort, and I was one of the few people willing to truck all the way up here to the wasteland.”

                Dave chuckled again. He paused, gazing out of the tiny window at the side of the room.

                “It really is a shithole now, isn’t it? That resort was near here, I’m pretty sure. It sucked then, too. But it had snow, and my dad wanted me to see it. I miss him. Heck, maybe I’ll see him soon.”

                “I thought you weren’t religious.”

                “Eh, atheists and foxholes and all of that. Just because I don’t believe in it doesn’t mean I don’t want to. Of course I want there to be something. I’m awfully close to the end, may as well be optimistic.”

                “That makes sense.”

Dave picked up a stack of two red disks, bounced it around the board a bit, and smiled.

                “I win.”

                He looked up at Markus.

                “Thanks, kid. I feel good about this, somehow.”

                And then he was grey.

 

                The change was fast. His eyes, glazed, were still focused on Markus. But the light was gone. All the hairs on his body stood up in an instant, and the color rushed out of his skin. He looked like a statue.

Markus stepped out and quietly waved over the men who had been standing anxiously a few feet down the hall, glancing at their watches. Two more had been brought in since he had started, apparently. They were with other counselors designated to final moments duty. The suits weren’t holding up as well as had been hoped, the thorns on the vines were sharper than anticipated. He held the door open as they carried the frozen body of David Albright, 82, Volunteer, out to the gurney.

There were two hundred volunteer workers in the cleanup effort. Eighty-three of them died. Markus counseled twenty of them through their final moments. Some of them cried, some of them screamed. Most of them were calm. Like Dave, they had almost died before - or were running down the clock on a terminal disease. That was why they volunteered. But none of them laughed like Dave had. He wondered at that, later on. Perhaps it was his own inexperienced nervousness that allowed that snap to occur. Or something about their personalities aligned to let him lose his demeanor. Maybe it was both.

They blew up the facility twenty years later, once they had determined none of the contaminate remained to be sent airborne by the blast. Everyone present with an idea of how the agent functioned was sworn to secrecy. They built a memorial at the base of the mountain, alongside the highway to the shambling near-ghost-town of Aspen. Nothing fancy. A plaque, some names, an obelisk, and a public restroom cleaned twice a month.

Towards the end of his life, Markus would find himself drawn to return to that slimly populated wasteland. He joined a tour group going up to take part in the mountaineering trips that had risen in popularity throughout the area. While they climbed the dusty peaks, he stayed in the hotel, and eventually convinced a local guide to drive him to the monument.

It was dusty. Uncleaned, unloved. He ran his fingers along the names. Distant memories filled in for some of them. Tears. Sadness. Numb acceptance. Then he found it. David Albright, 82, Volunteer. He dusted off the name, and the well-worn memory of the strange, laughing man’s final moments floated across his mind.

“You sure I can’t drive you up to the peak of Mount Elbert?”

They were driving back toward Aspen. Markus’ guide was doing his best to provide a worthwhile experience of the wasteland, but all Markus could muster was a passive gaze out of the window at the passing rocks and cliffs.

“We can get most of the way there in this and the climb after that isn’t too bad, even for older folks like you.”

Markus huffed. Not a chuckle, not a sigh. Somewhere in-between.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked his chauffer.

“Mid-sixties?”

“Seventy-two.”

“You don’t look a day older than sixty-five.”

Now a chuckle. A real chuckle. The old bits always work.

“I don’t know if I want to go all that way to see a big rock surrounded by other big rocks.”

“What about snow?”

Markus’ eyes lit up.

“Snow?”

“Yup. We had our first snowfall in just over a century last month. There’s still some patches sticking up there, if the reports I’ve heard are right.”

Markus’ gaze finally focused, and he looked up at the passing peaks.

“Well, why not?”

“Really?”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

“Fantastic! It’s about an hour back the way we came, if that’s alright.”

“Fine. While we’re driving, can I tell you a story?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Let me tell you about Dave.”