When he had stepped outside, early on that particularly dark morning for late spring, Wilfred could have supposed that the city tasted a little sharper, a little sourer, than it usually did. That the buildings had seemed to strain more onerously against the burden of the fog when rising from their night time slumbers, steel joints compressing as if each had to shield the streets from the fingers of the heavy air. That the sun had strayed from its common routine of piercing the barrier between dawn and day. It instead hid its golden streaks; the ones that normally glinted off the glassy waters of the bay and the myriad clean-cut skyscrapers to awaken all slivers of the metropolis.
However, Wilfred did not suppose any of this until three years had passed.
Three years, to the day.
By that time, he had moved suburbs, purchased a new car, and updated his cellular device four times, switching from one brand to another. It was not as if he had become content or moved on, nor that he had become accustomed to the change; not even that he had accepted the fate of his brother, Liam. He most definitely remembered that day, and most definitely wished he had no need to.
For when Liam Costello had emerged from the hospital two years and 363 days ago, he had no longer been Liam Costello.
And, one night, it was on the screen of that fourth cellular device that Wilfred finally understood why.
*****
The bleached white sheets of the emergency ward bed, upon which Liam had been slumped, had looked beige next to his face. His breathing had been a pattern of wheezing gulps, even with the assistance of a broad tube ushering oxygen into his lungs. His core temperature was icy - like the snow that fell upon his favourite ski fields in the winter.
He would never ski again.
Wilfred had been confined to a chair outside the theatre. He had shaken his head while staring at the doors of the ward. Wilfred leant forward and rested his forehand upon his palms, squeezing his temples with his shaking thumbs. On them, like the rest of his fingers, no white of the nail remained. He whispered, and his words struck the floor and bounced back to him.
There's an unknown bacterium in his bloodstream.
Wilfred's thoughts had drifted into the streets, interspersing with those of others who had been paralysed, stricken with the disbelief that eight people, just like them, were fighting some beast or some curse; the confusion lay in the air like the nightly fog, a cloud of unknown that enveloped the city.
And, as Wilfred had noticed, his fellow citizens had pleaded for these clouds to rain reason and dissolve the haze. Was it some conspiracy: an infiltration by the mafia, a CIA test, the military, another health scare?
Wilfred's jaw tightened at the thought.
But what astounded him were the odds. Eight people in a city of nearly nine hundred thousand. A chance of just one in one hundred and twelve thousand people.
And that one had to be Liam.
Wilfred walked away from the bus stop near his house as darkness veiled the sky. A faint vibration emanated from the phone in his pocket. The brightness scalded his fatigued eyes.
Just news.
But then the headings caught his eye.
He swiped to open the article, his breathing shallowed in the cool night air.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
A cry of incredulity hovered over the city.
*****
Wilfred should have known that something was in the air.
But he couldn't fathom such a thing.
As he walked home that night, the road in front of him was darker. The streetlights failed to glow; the few that did flickered and died.
When the night ended, they looked up to see a violent, scarlet sky. Deep crimson splotches swirled in a whirlpool of blood.
The fog had lifted.
