This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (33 page)

“Everything okay, Mom?” Anna called. Jack looked back. The corridor was well-lighted by an overhead skylight. She could plainly see Oliver gesticulating madly for her daughter to be quiet. Watching the old man’s commanding self-possession desert him made her smile a little.

Theo would have called her feeling
schadenfreude
. She wished he was here now to help them through this expedition. Theo felt stocking up on books was just as important as laying in cans of food and bottles of water. Jack preferred to think the lack of destruction in the bookstore indicated the looters had shown the merchandise some respect. For her husband, the lack of looting here would be an ugly metaphor confirming the human race was irredeemable and largely illiterate.

“Mom?” Anna called again, pointedly ignoring Oliver.

“It’s all good,” she said loudly.
 

“Don’t try to be hip, Mom. That’s so old.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” she yelled.

She searched for maps, but that shelf stood bare. She started back toward the store entrance, thought better of it and went to the far wall. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for.

“Turn around, guys,” Jack told her children when she emerged from the blackness. She unzipped their backpacks. “Graduation presents,” she said. “It’s time Jaimie read
Catcher
and Anna, for you, I think you’re old enough to read
Portnoy’s Complaint
.”

“I read
Catcher in the Rye
already,” Anna said, “but
Portnoy’s Complaint
? Isn’t that an old person’s book?”

“It’s the funniest book you’ll ever read,” Jack said flatly. “Your father will be pleased.”

“I’m probably way past the time when I should have been introduced to it then,” Anna said in her wry, I-am-not-a-child tone.
 

An image of her daughter with Trent came up unbidden.
She’s a healthy, pretty18 and Trent’s a good-looking idiot,
Jack thought.
Yes, she’d probably been protecting Anna too long.
 

Two of Anna’s schoolmates had had unplanned pregnancies. They’d had the condom talk when her daughter had turned fifteen, but Jack had hoped fervently that Anna had not used any of the box of condoms she handed her. Anna had uttered a disgusted, comforting “
Ew!
”, which pleased Jack. She promised her daughter she would never count the number of condoms in the box.

Such conventions and passages seemed a trite, almost silly convention now. The new world was born with the Sutr virus and safe, prolonged childhoods were at an end.

“If the book club is finished its meeting, could we get on with the fight for survival and all that?” Oliver said. “If it’s not too inconvenient?”

“Somebody needs to read a funny book,” Jack said.

“Sorry. Almost dying of Sutr must have made me cranky.”
 

They picked their way forward. The glass displays were all broken but someone had gone at the mess with a push broom. Farther on, the shards of glass had been pushed to the side and piled out of the way.
 

Most stores were empty. Racks and shelving littered the floor. At each empty doorway, they peered in and shone their lights to see if there was anything worth daring the dark.

“It’s worse than when I was here the last time,” Oliver whispered to Jack. “We should leave soon. Feels like a shrine to conspicuous consumption has become a tomb.”

The quartet doubled back, Anna still holding Jaimie’s hand and pulling him along at the rear. Several times they stopped to listen. The rise and fall of the voice did not come again.

Oliver motioned for them to move faster. However, Jack darted into a kitchen supply store. They heard her shift something out of the way. A crash and a clang.
 

“Mom!’ Anna called. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine!” A moment later, Jack emerged from the store holding a frying pan in each hand. One was small and light. The other was a heavy iron skillet. “Found it under a display,” she said. “Almost missed it, but the handle was sticking out.”

They moved forward again, passing a dead fountain. The clothing stores had been sacked. Jack turned Anna around and put the small pan in her backpack. The big skillet wouldn’t fit easily. Jack felt its heft and opted to keep it as a weapon.
 

They came upon another dark store. Jack motioned for the group to stay at the storefront and disappeared. While Oliver kept a wary eye on the corridor ahead and behind them, Anna watched the bobbing circle of light play over the store’s debris.

The shop was narrow and deep. Before she had walked more than ten feet, Jack’s feet slipped out from under her and she was on her back. The flashlight rolled and spun away to her right. She had a firm grasp of the iron skillet and it made a formidable clang against the floor as she went down. She arched her back and looked toward the entry point again.
 

Anna, Jaimie and Oliver stood, upside down and far away. The breath had been knocked from her, but only for a moment.

“Mom? Mom!”

When she caught her breath, Jack assured them she was well. She leaned on an empty display as she got to her feet. “Hell of a lot of trouble to find a good sweater or two.”

“I shopped here not long ago,” Anna said.
 

“Things change,” Oliver said, looking away, searching for…what?

Jack realized the old man had not moved, or even looked in her direction, when she’d fallen. Instead, he had kept watch. Jack knew the old man was nervous, but even Jaimie had looked her way when the skillet banged on the floor. Jaw tight, she recovered the flashlight.
 

Despite all he’d said and done, Douglas Oliver didn’t care enough about her. This little expedition had taught her that. When they got back, she’d sit down with Theo and discuss whether they could risk taking their old neighbor along with them if they had to run.
 

“I slipped on a plastic shopping bag,” she announced.
 

“Grab it,” Oliver said.
 

She found a pile of them behind the counter. She stuffed a few in a pocket and when that proved inadequate she tucked the rest under her belt. She played the light over the floor. There must have been a fight. There were shreds of fabric here and there, as if looters had actually had a tug of war and T-shirts were the rope.

Jack wanted to turn around and return to the light, but she thought she might find something in a change room. Fallen shelving made the floor uneven. She almost lost her footing again a couple of times.
 

Jack directed the flashlight beam at her feet, not comprehending what she was seeing at first. Jack turned her light upward and understood. “People ripped out the ceiling tiles!”

“Why would anyone waste energy doing that?” Anna called back.

“Because they could,” Oliver said.

Jack looked back, feeling foolish for staying so long. In a store where even the ceiling tiles were ripped out, she was lucky to find discarded plastic bags for salvage. She was about to back out when the smell hit her. She sniffed the air like an animal, searching not just to identify the smell, but to find a direction. It was coming from the back of the store.
 

She moved deeper into the darkness. She knew it would be better just to turn around now, but what if someone had a cache of food? Among maggot-riddled and stinking waste, there might be a useful can of tuna or salmon.
 

The closer she got, the less likely that seemed, but she had come this far, so what was a few more steps? Perhaps that same smell would have repelled other searchers, so they missed something she would not. However, the closer she got to the source of the stench, the less it was about finding food. Curiosity took over. She needed to
know
.

A bank of change rooms lined the rear wall. A steel door that must lead to a storage room or an office stood to her right. She knocked twice and, suddenly feeling silly at the pre-pandemic gesture, put the end of the flashlight in her mouth and yanked on the handle several times. Locked.
 

There might be useful things in the office, but she moved on. A cross bar from a coat rack might give her the leverage she needed to crank that steel door open.
 

There was no one in there waiting to be rescued. She was sure there was at least one decaying body behind that door. Maybe more.

Jack thought of Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, from
Aliens
. By some unlikely Hollywood miracle, the hero of the movie discovered a little girl who had survived a massacre by evil rampaging monster aliens.
 

There must be heroes in every disaster. There must be children who survive them while everyone else around them dies horribly. Real life is not so mercifully scripted, she knew. She thought of Nature’s wrath leaving dead children in trees after a mile-wide tornado ripped through Oklahoma.
 

After she spoke with her husband about Douglas Oliver and made sure everyone was fed, she planned to curl up with her Bible and study by the light of her flashlight. Maybe there was no making sense of the Sutr plague, but Jack needed to try again. She still hoped for solace.

Jack checked the change rooms for discarded clothes. Something that hadn’t fit someone else might fit Anna or herself. Jack smiled at her own naiveté, at how hard old habits died. She was in the wreck of a women’s clothing store and she was still thinking that what she found there could only serve Anna or herself. On a cold night this winter, sitting around a fire, neither Jaimie nor Theo would object to the warmth gained from another sweater, even if it had big girly flowers on it.
 

The first change room was empty. The second booth was not. She kicked the flimsy door back with a bang and the stench hit her in the nose, as if the disturbed air currents mixed and stirred risen death.

Advantage: Vampires,
Anna had said.

Jack reflexively held her mask tighter to her mouth with the hand that held the skillet, lightly conking herself in the temple.
Ripley wouldn’t do that,
she thought.
 

Heat rose to her cheeks. She felt incredibly stupid banging around the back of a deserted store with bodies in the back. Plastic bags couldn’t be worth this.

After this, Jack knew she’d never return to the hulk of a mall. The new place to shop would be the homes of the dead. They’d undoubtedly passed hundreds of empty homes behind the wall. In each home, there were plenty of closets with more clothes than they could wear in a lifetime, let alone carry. This trip had been Douglas Oliver’s idea and now she realized how stupid an errand it was.

The thing on the floor (
this corpse, this poor abandoned husk,
Jack thought) had been a woman who favored wearing red pumps to a looting. The skirt was long and matronly. Jack thought she spotted a clot of varicose veins where the skirt rode up high on a blue-gray thigh. It could be one of her neighbors or the mother of someone at her kids’ school.
 

Curiosity pulled again. She let the flashlight beam play up the body slowly, steeling herself for what she might see. This had been someone once. How had she died? Who was she?
 

In the next moment she was to learn the lesson again: pre-pandemic thinking did not apply anymore. How this woman had died, her identity, were heavy concerns in the old world. Now it was knowledge to be avoided. The lesson came hard: Jack saw the pool of crusted blood.
So much blood.
 

Then she thought she saw the head move.

The thing’s eyes opened. Bright yellow, wild eyes.

Nowhere to hide, few places to run

T
hey heard a bang and a short shout from within the clothing store.

“Mom!”

Anna let go of Jaimie’s hand and searched for her flashlight, cursing herself. She should have had it out and ready. She should have gone in with her mother.
 

Before she could pull the flashlight out of her front pocket — her jeans were too tight — Jack burst out of the darkness with her hand over her mask. She was gasping for air as if she had just risen from deep water. She leaned against Anna.
 

“It’s okay! I’m alright!” She pulled her mask away from her mouth to pull in fresh air. After a few more long drags to fill her lungs, she readjusted the mask over her mouth again. “At first, I thought someone had taken a dump in a change room,” she said. “There’s a body in there.”

“That’s awful,” Anna said.

Jack shook her head vigorously and swallowed hard. “— and a cat!”
 

Her mother’s eyes told all Anna needed to know. Her eyes widened as she guessed what her mother had seen. “That’s much worse,” Anna said.

“Was it Sutr?” Oliver asked.

“I don’t think so…but I hope cats get the virus. Every one of them.”

They were silent for a time after that and surveyed each store more quickly. The carnage seemed complete. Overturned kiosks littered the centre of the corridors.
 

“I guess people really thought they’d need skin lotion from the dead sea,” Anna said, pointing at a sacked kiosk.
 

A scatter of cell phones littered the floor. “And people finally got some vengeance on their cell providers,” Oliver added, poking a pile of the phones with the end of his walking stick.

“Couldn’t those phones be useful? I mean, the network isn’t working now, but it might later, right?” Anna asked.

Kind silence met her naive suggestion.

Douglas Oliver bent to look under a Cookie Hut kiosk. He found nothing in a sealed package and sighed. “Anna, the only central service that’s still intact, the one that requires the least maintenance in the short run, is water. I’d guess we’re a long way from having cell phone service back up. Whatever services that might return are no doubt prioritized by the government. They don’t want us talking to each other on cell phones, I’ll bet.”

“What government would
that
be?” a young man’s voice came from above. “You see any government here?”