This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (21 page)

“That’s why you’re Moneybags, dude. Your dad’s always thinkin’ and mine’s always drinkin’.” Kenny put his shotgun on the other side of the fence and climbed over. “Pull your balls up,” he said as he pulled down on the barbed wire to give Theo room to swing a leg over.

“Oh,” Kenny said, stepping forward to stop Theo. “Wait, don’t climb over wi—”

Boom!

The shotgun blast tore through Kenny’s chest and left shoulder, knocking him off his feet and into the tall, soft grass.
 

Theo dropped the gun. The trigger had caught on a sharp tine of wire. The echo of the shotgun blast rolled back to him, freezing him for a moment, one leg still on the ground, the other still up, his pant leg caught in the fence wire.
 

He tore his pants to break free, threw himself flat and scurried under the wire. Theo ran to Kenny, who had landed on one side, twisted in mid-air as the pellets had ripped through his left lung.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Theo cried.

Kenny blinked wide blue eyes at him. He winced and coughed up blood. Theo dared a look. He saw the white flash of Kenny’s bared ribs and looked away.

Shotguns forgotten, Theo grabbed the shoulders of his friend’s jacket and dragged him toward the house, shouting for help as he went. After forty feet, he felt so weak he doubted he could go on.
 

At the top of the rise sat the lone tree, a twisted oak, in the center of the fallow field. He made that his destination. From there he’d be able to see the cottage and then maybe his parents would see him or hear his screams for help. The nearest doctor was in Poeticule Bay. Theo pulled Kenny again, in desperate lunging spurts.
 

How much blood does one person have to spare? The boy didn’t know. His brain drained of any thought but the pulling.

The light was dim as Theo pulled Kenny under the big tree. He stood and looked down the field. The car was gone. His parents were out, probably picking up the farewell dinner. They’d talked about getting Chicken Burger take-out. The boy didn’t know how long it would take them to return.

Theo looked down at his friend in the grass. A long bloody trail had followed him up the rise to where Kenny lay. Kenny waved him to come closer. He was breathing in short gasps, but he managed to whisper in Theo’s ear.

“Say I did it,” Kenny said. “Say I did it.”

“That doesn’t matter now,” Theo said.

“They’ll kill you,” Kenny gasped. “I did it. Brian will kill you.”

“I’ll go get help!” Theo said, but Kenny grabbed his sleeve and held on.

“Stay…don’t leave me alone…stay…not much longer.”

Theo held his friend in his arms and cried. After another moment, he pulled some moss away from the base of the tree behind them and put it over the gaping wound. He put pressure on the wound like they said to do in movies. Theo leaned heavily on the moss.

After some time passed, Kenny spoke again in a high voice. “Doesn’t hurt anymore.”
 

The ground beneath them was soaked black in the dull light.

“Cold.”

Theo gave up on pushing on the moss and hugged his friend. He held him and cried and rocked and shouted for help.
 

The light abandoned them to the creeping dark and stars arrived to welcome the dying boy. Soon the night took over and the Milky Way unfurled overhead.
 

“Shooting stars?” Kenny murmured.

“I don’t know, man. We’ll watch and see. There must be a few more left over from last night. Must be. We’ll wish on one. My parents will be home soon. We’ll wish and we’ll get help.”

Some time passed. Theo was never sure how long.
 

Headlights from his father’s car swept the field, but Kenny had already left through the Gateway.
 

Theo lay beside him, staring up into space, wondering where Kenny went. In church, they sang a hymn called “
I’ll Fly Away
”. Theo tried to remember the words, not to sing to his friend, but for clues. It was so quiet and clear, Theo could make out every cold star, every indifferent constellation.

His parents went into the cottage, each carrying a bag. In a moment they were outside calling his name.

“If Kenny’s gone somewhere…if he’s not just gone…give me a sign.”
 

His father had bolted back inside the house and returned with a flashlight. They were headed his way, heading toward the field where he and Kenny usually played with the bow and arrow and shot targets.

“They’re coming,” Theo whispered an urgent prayer. “Give me a sign, God, please!”

No loon called. No warm breeze caressed his cheek. Not a single shooting star shot across the sky.

* * *

Theo opened his eyes and regarded the outline of his silent son in cool morning light. “People make a big deal about lots of things, but time moves on. People change and move. I moved away as soon as I could. I escaped to a boarding school. I went to university. I reinvented myself. No one knew I killed Kenny in a careless moment. Nobody knew I lied about how it happened. I got away with it.”

His chest spasmed and he coughed hard for a few minutes, bringing up green sputum and spitting it into a tissue. Jaimie didn’t move. Theo expected no reaction from his son. It was as if he was making his confession to a stone.
 

After another wave of coughing ebbed, he looked at the ceiling. He relaxed talking to Jaimie, his secret as safe as talking to himself. “After all’s said and done, guilt is just geographical. Something bad happens, and if you move far away, the artificial borders we put on places is enough.”

Jaimie detected the empty sound in his father’s voice. He thought it likely that was the first lie his father had spoken to him.

“Eventually, we’ll have to go to Papa’s farm. Out under that old oak tree, by the stone, that’s where you’ll find it. Southeast from the back step, hidden amongst the stand of Christmas trees my father planted the year after I shot Kenny. That’s the Gateway to the Spirit World. It’s where I should lie down when I’m done living. There would be a symmetry to that. We’ll go there, or maybe I’ll meet you there. Or maybe you’ll have to carry me there. That’s where I should go. I should leave Earth from where D’Arcy Kennigan left.”

Theo turned on his side toward Jaimie, his eyes haunted. “When he died out there, something died in me, too. I already died once, with my friend. I was only ten…but it didn’t hurt that much and it was over quick. I just…it’s the place I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid to die here, but out there, it’ll be okay. That’s where I should be when I’m ready to let go and see what happens next. Out under the stars.”

Jaimie nodded. He wanted to say, “I’ll make sure,” but, of course, he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

The chain of food is upside down

J
aimie had seen his father cry once before, on the phone in the kitchen, when he got the news of Nana Spence’s death. Nana Spence had been Jaimie’s grandmother. She was divorced from Papa Spence and Jaimie had never met her.
 

The boy watched and wondered about death, a word that seemed to have much more weight than the dictionary conveyed. The dictionary entries were short and clinical, but held no answers. The wizards who had devised language were painters without enough paint on their brushes when it came to the real meaning of death.

Jaimie examined his father for clues as he received the news. Theo held the phone in one hand and in the other he held a bright red apple. As tears crept down his cheeks, Theo listened to Papa Spence describe how his wife died.
 

He listened a long time, silent and nodding. When Theo looked at the apple, he didn’t know what to do with it. He rubbed his eyes roughly with the back of his hand and stood awkwardly, saying, “Uh-huh…uh-huh…uh-huh…” into the phone.
 

Jaimie took the apple from his father’s palm gently and watched each tear stream to his father’s chin and hang there, ripe, until it fell to his shirt.
 

Animals move through the world with more purpose than people do,
he thought.
Perhaps because they don’t see their ends coming and so, are less distracted from their needs: food, water, shelter, love.
 

“Love” was a word strangely like death. Countless words had been written about love, but it was no better understood. In that case, Jaimie surmised that the wizards had too much paint on their palette and so their thick illustrations came out black and indecipherable. People said love was like this or like that, but Jaimie was still unclear what it was. People love babies and each other and TV shows and hamburgers. Surely, the word was too flexible.

Why had Theo ruffled Jaimie’s hair while he was on the phone? Jaimie was confused. He guessed at the warmth of his father’s gesture. That looked like love between a father and son. It felt good, but the love his father felt for Nana Spence now? It looked painful. That sort of love did not appear to serve Theo.

As his father recounted D’Arcy Kennigan’s death, had Theo told him a story about boyhood love? Or was it only guilt over an accident that brought on his father’s tears? Had he loved his friend Kenny? Or was it his father’s love of the boy he’d been, before the accident, which gave him such pain now?

Jaimie watched as his father finally cried himself to sleep. Jaimie had seen Anna do that often two years before when she broke up with her first boyfriend. Jack said she was too young to have a serious boyfriend, but Jaimie thought it must matter to Anna very much. For months, she either did not speak or spoke of little else. The boy didn’t understand tears, but he understood how something could occupy your mind so much you couldn’t think of anything else.
 

Obsession is a kind of love, he decided. Jaimie loved his dictionaries.

Anna’s first obsession had been a new boy in her class named Thomas. Her first love had lasted three weeks. Then Thomas called Jaimie a retard and Anna got angry and all the kissing stopped. The fighting started. Thomas, who’d been a daily staple, disappeared. Anna seemed furious with Jaimie and he couldn’t understand what he had done wrong. Then she was furious at Thomas again. Later, Anna flew into a rage because Thomas had another girlfriend too soon. Jaimie searched his dictionaries, but he couldn’t find a rule about that.

`Jaimie’s obsession with words and their easy confusions irritated and puzzled him.
Puzzle
. There was another annoying homonym: puzzle, the verb; puzzle, the noun. But these were trifles compared to his sister’s mood swings. Anna’s rapid changes in temperament, especially her anger, bewildered him. Anna’s love for Thomas turned to anger in a tornado mix of colors that Jaimie took some pleasure in observing, so rich and deep were the passing hues of her moods. Anna’s aura was most vivid, like moving impressionistic paintings that raged in surprise storms.
 

“Teenage hormones,” Jack said.

Love, Jaimie decided, could be understood only in the abstract, the way people understood that the number pi kept on going, but past a thousand places, it became another meaningless word, like “death”, or “mind” or the curious demand to pair “forgive and forget”.
 

Forgiveness and forgetting do not equate in the dictionary, but Mrs. White, Jaimie’s special teacher at school, frequently told him the words were equal and he should think them so when bad boys called him names.

Around seven in the morning, Jaimie heard a familiar rattle of metal outside. After a moment, Douglas Oliver appeared with a shopping cart full of red gas cans. The old man walked quickly, but he moved like his feet hurt. He leaned heavily on the cart’s handle, the gray colors of exhaustion wrapping around him like an old wool blanket.

As Jaimie watched, the old man tried the handle on the Bendham’s garage door. It lifted a few inches and then fell back. Oliver tried again twice and then stalked to the end of the driveway and waved to someone down the street to join him.

A thin bearded man on a battered bicycle wheeled up to him. The bicycle was fitted with a large woven basket, secured haphazardly with silver and green duct tape. The basket was filled with things. Some kind of rifle stood high in the basket. It reminded Jaimie of a painting he’d seen of a man on a bicycle with a large basket of bread. The rifle could be like the tall stick of French bread in the painting. (Why
French
bread? They had American bread, but his family just called it bread.)

When the man on the bicycle turned to look at Mr. Oliver’s house, Jaimie saw who it was. It was Bently, the man Oliver had hit with a bag of cans. Bently seemed to be no danger now.
 

Oliver spoke quickly, urgently. He pointed to each house on the block, apparently giving instructions. The old man pointed to every house except his own. Oliver pulled the thin little man toward the garage. Together they lifted the door and emptied the bicycle basket of plastic bags. When they were done, only the rifle stayed in the basket.
 

Jaimie couldn’t see what it was they moved in the garage. When Bently stepped back, he looped a long necklace twice around his neck. Anxious for Bently to leave, Oliver pushed the bicycle at him and shooed him away. Bently shrugged and pedaled away slowly down the sidewalk.

Douglas Oliver spun toward the Bendham house. Bently looked back over his shoulder. He did something Jaimie had seen often, but couldn’t find in his dictionary. He put up the middle finger of one hand and pumped it at Mr. Oliver’s back. Anna called it “flipping the bird”. Jaimie wondered if he needed another dictionary so he could discover the secret signals everyone else somehow seemed to know. Where did people go to learn these things?

Theo Spencer rumbled and rasped in his sleep, shifting back and forth on the couch as if pinned under a heavy weight. The washcloth had fallen to his father’s chest. Just as his mother did when Anna was sick, Jaimie gently placed the back of his hand on Theo’s forehead. (No one term for the back of the hand. Why not? He’d have to write his own dictionary and remedy that oversight.)