Nuclavees in America

I don’t believe in divinely-distributed responsibility. If something is my business, it’s because I’ve made it my business. Like my father’s business, before I killed him, was lousy first aid advice, consultation, and occasionally, practice. I had to wonder if he’d ever read the first aid books he had under the record-player in the den, because I had. I almost wished I hadn’t, sometimes, when I watched him search for the radial artery on a patient and wind up pressing his two fingers into the carotid. He could stitch up a cut just fine, and he knew all about disinfectant, but he’d been sewing up his own shirts and saddles for years, and he’d been drinking alcohol long enough to know that even though he was treating his insides with one kind, he could treat his outsides with another kind. He would offer the former to his patients before he doused their cuts or stab wounds or what have you with the latter.

There was nothing he could have done for himself, in the end. I remember that much about him. I could see his liver, his kidneys, his blackening heart and grey lungs, all through his skin, just before I cut out his spine. He’d once told me where to stab someone in the spine to cause a mobility-ending injury. It turns out, that if you dig hard enough into any part of the spine, that really does it, for mobility. “I made it easier,” I told him, while he twitched on the end of the kitchen knife. I pushed his hands away when he tried to grab me, but there wasn’t much power left in them. His skin was already collapsing around his organs, like a sped-up video of a deflating balloon.

There are quicker and cleaner ways to do it, I’ve learned. The papers covered and proposed several methods at first, to make it easier, and simpler, but only some of them have caught on. A kitchen knife was risky- close range. If my father were smart, he would have figured out that joints and angles didn’t mean so much in that state. I might have been behind him, but if he’d really tried, he could have reached behind himself and grabbed me. He would have looked truly monstrous. I don’t know what that would have done to Sonny. Golden-smiled Sonny, the only one of us to never have been called to the office for physical altercations, the only one to want to be a civil engineer and go to school after high school, already looked faint when I pulled the knife out of dad. Connor was just behind him, because it didn’t matter that we hadn’t wanted to drag Sonny through this dirt. He would be dragged through, and there was no way to clean him, so he might as well get comfortable with it. The couple months we’d spent trying to make sure the end of the world didn’t reach him seemed especially pointless then.

There was news that something similar had been seen before. Nuclavees was the name. It was all over the news. Every channel had an Irish or English or Scottish folk explaining the transparent skin, the monstrous deconstruction of the organs, and then positing a mythological explanation for the appearance of nuclavees all over the country. Across the pond, they were having a field day. Our epidemic was something they could peak. Have a look on the television, dear. They’ve got Nuclavees. I was looking into schools for Sonny when the news stopped being news and started being shadows in the back garden. Then we abandoned the notion of school altogether. Academia looks great on applications and resumes. It’s the lube of the future, my father once said. Creates opportunities for you to slide yourself in somewhere. What can lube do for a dying country, though?

Sonny was scared enough to give up right away. There was no waving a white flag, just cowering on the floor, behind the door, in the closet. Hands over ears. Eyes squeezed shut. And when courage pricked up its head, he watched through the window as I stood on the porch with the shotgun and Connor packed the Mustang. Every neighbour had either fled or had ceded to the Nuclavees. Wherever they’d fled to, hoping to hide, they’d still probably cede to the Nuclavees. In America, everyone cares about trends. And giving up seemed to be the largest trend since slavery. Whole families were becoming infected. They twitched and seized on the floor, turning prismatic, and rose up with skin like ghost flowers. They prowled. They stalked. They still bled and tore the stitches my father had given them.

Illness takes everyone, I’d told Sonny. It’s nothing worse than a deadly strain of influenza. You just have to deal with a few extra steps after the dying. It must have been our father’s eyes in the Nuclavee’s face that turned my brother’s brain into the twisted filament shape it was in now. The eyes were, for the most part, where eyes should be. The face around it had changed. It wasn’t what you expected to see around eyes like that. But eyes were just eyes, after all, I told myself. I’d read the first aid books: optic nerve, vitreous humor, schlera. Even looking straight into them, I knew those eyes weren’t my father. Everything in that face wanted to kill us.

We’ve taken the Mustang and the first aid kit and every tool in the house that could be made into a weapon. If we can’t take back our town, or our country, we can carve a path to another place. One where the eyes aren’t a problem. One where no one has a problem pulling the trigger or forcing the knife in. One where people knew to bandage their wounds so they didn’t pull and bleed and attract the attention of something that was human. There’s got to be a place like that somewhere in the world, and if there isn’t, then I’ll make one. And if a Nuclavee kills me first, then I reckon it isn’t a problem. How will I be able to care.

Connor drinks while I drive, and for now he’s treating his insides with the right kind of alcohol, because I don’t think he’s been driven to treat his insides with the other kind, yet. I might not be the best at patching people up, but I’m better than my father was. I can keep the blood where it’s meant to be, and that’s enough for now. And if it’s too late, if I’m looking at eyes that are only relatively where they should be, in a face that shows me much more of a person’s insides than it should, then it’s enough that I know that what’s supposed to be there, on the inside, isn’t. And I know how to treat that too.

Art by Arash Radkia

Text by Lucie MacAulay