Rainbow’s End

By J. M. Faulkner

Death crept through the car park. Roddy rushed to the window, meeting his reflection in the pane.

Sunset.

To the naked eye, all was as it should be outside the intensive care unit. Doctors, orderlies, and visitors went about their business with no particular urgency. Roddy, however, knew different. Like the people milling two stories below, he could not see danger; unlike them, he could smell it.

His larynx bobbed. Death was coming to collect his sister.

Flora lay supine, a child sallow against her hospital bedclothes, an NG tube filling one nostril. Cancer was worse than war, Roddy thought. In combat, you could at least shoot your enemy or flee. Cancer couldn’t be frightened off, diffused, or liberated.

Just like Death.

Roddy had first encountered Death six years ago in Iraq. An IED brought their convoy to a halt between two villages. The explosion signaled ISIS fighters to launch an ambush from their dune vantage point. As bullets hailed down on Roddy’s platoon, a putrid stench flooded his nostrils—though a drop of blood had yet to wet the sand. Worse was the sense that something unseen and malignant stalked the desert, something that revolted him, physically and spiritually. But when he appealed to his superior, he was told to shut up and keep firing.

In the wake of that command, a tailwind—a vaporous, oscillating force of decay—blanketed the sand and, in quick succession, the wide-eyed injured on both sides perished, as if the plugs that tethered them to this plane had been yanked free.

Since then, Roddy had witnessed the stench he labeled Death take countless lives of the maimed and expiring—of those who clung to life by the thinnest threads. And as always, Death could not be frightened off, diffused, or reasoned with.

But what if they could outrun it?

Roddy detached Flora from the machines, scooped her limp body into his arms, and pushed into the hallway. His tongue caught in his throat. The smell thickened. Closer. He marched to the rear of the building, attempting to blend in, looking for an exit.

Flora murmured his name.

“Shhh. Sleep.”

He cradled her face to his chest, shielding her from the blazing hospital lights. Eight short months ago, she had won her school play’s starring role in Alice in Wonderland. She had asked Roddy to help with rehearsals, and the distraction had helped him forget the Iraqi deserts. He had not thought it would follow him here.

And what was Death? An opaque smog? A stalking intelligence, cloaked and wielding a scythe? A Jinn? Whatever phantom had taken to taunting Roddy snared the souls of those who might yet live. Perhaps if he could keep Flora away from it, she would live.

One thing he knew for certain: Death existed in a constant, shifting state of necrosis. If Roddy could follow his nose…

People stared at him now, and he averted his gaze. Exhaled. Sweat streamed down his forehead.

“Stop!” A man in doctor’s whites. Mustache. “What on earth are you doing?”

Roddy had been medically discharged from the British Army. He had no illusions about explaining his dilemma. To the best of his knowledge, his abilities were unique. One way or another this ended with him in handcuffs.

He turned and ran before skidding to a halt.

Ahead, the reek of a gangrenous pumpkin bloated in the sun and crawling with earwigs. He retched and buckled at the knee, almost dropping Flora in an attempt to cover his mouth. He couldn’t see it, but what radiated in his path stank of festering wounds and maggots. An exhalation of the malign.

The doctor had been hot on his tail, but he too came to an abrupt halt. A look of consternation spread across his face.

An old man staggered into view, oblivious, his skin yellow with disease. His eyes bulged and then, convulsing, he collapsed.

The doctor sprinted to the fallen man while Roddy fled back the way he had come, no longer concealing the fact he was abducting a patient. Havoc broke out behind him, and he shouldered past those standing in his way, weaving between grasping hands, taking every bend to avoid pursuers.

At the end of the corridor, a nurse slipped her ID card through a machine. Bleep. Doors whooshed open, and Roddy skated through the gap, barely glimpsing the sign above the frame:

Rainbow’s End.

He was halfway into the room when he dug his heels into the linoleum. A cadaver lay naked on a metal table, and above it loomed a doctor with a plastic face shield tugging rubber gloves up her wrists.

Rainbow’s End… The mortuary.

The mortician was injecting the corpse with a brass needle when she spotted Roddy. He must have been a sight because she scrambled into a side room and fastened the door.

To his distress, Roddy could see no exit.

Dead end.

The entrance pulsed with the fetor of Death.

Roddy backed into the embalming table, and the cavity injector rattled. He fumbled for it, not taking his eyes off the doors, his head swimming and stomach acid lashing his insides. Death closed in; Roddy stifled his vomit.

Flora’s eyes flicked open. She gasped, “Roddy?” as Death seized her.

Roddy plunged the injector at the air—and the brass needle hit something solid. Thwack. Formaldehyde engulfed Death.

The stench materialized as an expanding miasma, pumping like a heart. As the formaldehyde destroyed its bacteria and attached to its proteins, Death’s life-giving necrosis ground to a halt. The cavity injector clapped to the ground, and the miasma listed up an air vent.

The mortician stepped nervously into the main room. She yanked up her face shield. “I… What was that?”

Roddy sank to his knees and shook his sister. “Flora!”

“Roddy?” She sounded inebriated.

He planted a kiss on her forehead, squeezing her slender shoulders. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

She smiled up at him. “Did you smell something?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. M. Faulkner graduated with a BA in English Language & Linguistics from the University of York. Presently, he teaches British English in Prague, Czech Republic. It is the perfect place for him to steep himself in the architecture and tumultuous history that fuels his curiosity. Outside of work, you can find him hiking in splendid, Bohemian forests with his beagle.