This Plague of Days, Season Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (23 page)

Shiva drummed her fingers on the table and her lips twisted into a cruel sneer. “I gave up that fantasy when I saw that the only advancements we were going to make were in weapons tech. Governments were interested in every war except the war on suffering. They talked of suicide space missions to an airless, barren planet while they make Earth more barren each day.”

“Amen, Dear Sister.”

“I gave up those old hopes. Progress was too slow. The people need new leaders, unhinged from the meta-money system and the metal murder machine. So I took up the mantle. I'll lead what's left”

A new leader, unhinged,
Lijon thought.

Shiva smiled brightly. Lijon sat back in her seat, wary for the next mood swing.

“Now something new is happening that I hadn’t imagined. When I was at Johns Hopkins, I’d assumed we’d reach down into our cells with nanotechnology to cleanse ourselves of impurity and disease. Now I wonder if our cells might reach up to us, instead? As we approach new understandings, I’m sure science will be indistinguishable from magic.”

Lijon burst out with a giggle. “Dear Sister, you — ” She stopped herself and drank her tea.

When she looked up, Shiva stared back angrily. Her leader pulled the mirrored sunglasses down her nose an inch. Shiva’s irises shone bright white.

Lijon gasped. Her hand shook as she set her teacup down. Her heart pounded. She felt pinned by Shiva’s eerie gaze.

“You were about to say I sound like a frat boy high on drugs,” Shiva said.

Lijon’s eyes widened. “Dear Sister — ”

“It’s fine. It’s true. I’ve been going through some changes since the fever. I can’t explain it in words but…” She reached for Lijon’s cup, took it in her palm and crushed it to shards and powder with one squeeze. Shiva’s hand dripped blood on the tabletop. She did not grimace. In fact, she smiled.
 

Lijon stared, her jaw slack. “Doesn’t that hurt you?”

“I do sense it. Call it pain, but it feels like it’s happening to someone else.”

“H-how?”

“I believe we’ve earned the attention of a great force. It is on my side.”

“A great force? What do you mean? Do you mean…God?”

“Something like that, maybe. I don’t know. I have strange dreams that connect me to a network of others…I’ve only spoken to one person, so far, but I can sense there are others like me.”

“How do you mean?”

“There is the one who speaks to me, but others are nearby, like there are shadows of strangers lurking in my peripheral vision.”

“Someone speaks to you in your dreams? You mean like an angel?”

“Ha! No. That one’s a devil. But the others? It’s like I’m on the edge of tapping into the collective unconscious.”

“A working cell phone network sounds more efficient.” Lijon tried to smile, but her leader’s eyes told her not to joke. Those gleaming white irises were those of a dangerous, nocturnal animal. Lijon cleared her throat again. “You say…a devil — ”

“Sometimes I see someone who opposes us. He’s trying to sap my resolve. He will not succeed. I’ll burn him down and kill anyone who sides with him.”

Lijon believed her.
 

“With these visions, I’m going to have to reevaluate my degrees from Johns Hopkins and Cambridge. If most of the school administration weren’t already dead or joining the horde, I might ask for my money back.”

Lijon tried a smile, failed, and looked away trembling.
 

“What is it, Little Sister?”

“Your eyes — ”

“I know. Not that!” Shiva pounded the table. “Tell me what you’re hiding!”

“The dreams. Is it a boy with mirrors instead of eyes?”

The baby kicked hard and Shiva’s savage eyes widened. “What did he say to you?”

“He says he’s a messenger. He said something in Latin.”

Shiva pounded the table again with her bloodied fist and threw the remnants of the teacup against the wall. “Say it! What is his message?”

Lijon shook. “
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem
.”

Shiva stood. “Meaning?”

“He explained it to me. When all hope is abandoned and you’re sure you’ve nothing to lose, you’ll do what must be done to conquer. The boy said that when it looks most like he has lost the coming battle, that’s when he will win.”

“What battle? What else did he tell you?”

“He doesn’t know. He says he can’t see the future. He says he’s just a messenger and there are many possible futures. He says we’ve taken the wrong path.”

“What else?”

“He says we should stop.”

Shiva’s arm flashed out and she grabbed Lijon around the throat, lifting her from her seat. “And why didn’t you tell me before now?”

Lijon wheezed. “Because it’s a
nightmare
!” She began to choke. “I-I’m sorry! I thought that’s all it could
possibly
be! A nightmare! It’s
insane
!”

Shiva released her. Lijon collapsed on the table.

The headset speaker clicked. “We’re precisely ten minutes from landfall, Dear Sister.”

“Thank you. We’re on our way up.”

Lijon coughed and rubbed her throat. She croaked, “Full speed, Dear Sister?”

“Full speed. The piggies are waiting. Let’s give them drama.”

Lijon trembled as she keyed her headset mic. “General quarters! All crew! General quarters! This is not a drill. Ten minutes to impact! Prepare for collision!”

Shiva nodded and swept out of the cabin.

Lijon bent stiffly to lift her backpack from the floor. She paused to look around the suite one last time. She would miss the comforts the
Mars
had provided. The bed had been comfortable. She could stay in the hot bath for hours. Her one trip on a luxury cruise liner had been too short.

But the war waited for her, just a little way down the wrong path.

The dream messenger had shown Lijon the Battle of the Brickyard. She’d witnessed the chaos brought by the new breed of white-eyed savages. They’d defeated the last human army in one horrifying night.

“Sutr-X was the killer flu pandemic,” the boy had explained. “Sutr-Z’s victims are like the zombies on your ship. Sutr-A made Alphas. They call themselves vampires, but a monster, by any other name, would smell as rank.”
 

It was too late for Lijon to do what the dreamer asked of her. It was best that she’d kept the serrated blade concealed in her belt in its sheath.

Shiva had been clever and dangerous before the plague. Lijon doubted her leader ever felt real empathy for another’s pain. But to be impervious to physical pain, as well? Dear Sister’s fierce eyes saw too much. Shiva was too strong for Lijon to slay.

The boy would have to kill Shiva himself, if he dared to try.

G
OD
’
S
TOO
HIGH
TO
REACH
WITH
TINY
VOICES

E
guskine X. Zubiri was one Manhattanite who witnessed the first Sutr-Z attack on American soil. When he told the story later, he didn’t describe the cruise ship’s destruction as a crash. He said the ship “made land” the way hurricanes are said to hit.

Gus had been a busker in the subway at the 68
th
Street Hunter College station before Sutr’s first wave. The short, handsome young man played the violin for Lexington Avenue Line commuters as a little marionette danced a clumsy jig at his feet. The hours were long and the work was hard. The marionette was guided by strings from his left hand. The doctor at the free clinic told him he was getting carpal tunnel syndrome. The doctor said he had to find another line of work.

The busker was spared that challenge when there weren’t enough commuters to perform for anymore. His audience was staying home with the flu, or dying off. Gus turned to the shelters and dumpster diving. However, the shelters were soon closed for harboring disease and, without commuters, the restaurants were abandoned.
 

Before the plague, Gus had used poppers. He loved the short high from those little brown bottles too much. Then one night, Jessica, the dealer who sold him the amyl nitrate told him all her other clients used it to “relax the ass muscle.”
 

Until that moment, Gus had no idea why poppers were so popular among gay men. When Jessica asked if that was why he used, Gus denied the charge. When Jessica smiled, he was sure she didn’t believe him. Gus knew then that his chances of making Jessica his girlfriend had dropped from barely possible to never in a million lifetimes. Embarrassed, he walked out of her flop and never saw Jessica again.

Gus slept in Central Park for a week until steady rain drove him inside. There were plenty of places to sleep, but few that weren’t dripping with disease. Sutr-X flew through the five boroughs. Too many people packed tight meant mass contagion. Crime, which had dropped steadily for twenty years, shot up. However, most of the victims were the dead and the crimes were usually trespassing and stealing food.

Gus was better off than he’d been on the street, as long as he ignored the dead stench. Apartment buildings were towers of death. People were told to burn bodies in the street to avoid diseases worse than Sutr.

That’s when Gus moved into an empty brownstone across from Central Park. The family who had lived there smiled out at him from happy pictures on bookshelves. There had been a mother, a father and two boys.
 

Gus had one brother somewhere in Brooklyn. He hoped his real brother was dead. But, comfortable in looted Armani suits, Gus gave the absent owners his own parents’ names. The anonymous, big-haired mom in the pantsuit became Maria. The father looked like a serious businessman annoyed at having a family picture taken at Sears’ Portrait Studio. His heavy brow reminded Gus of his own father, Ernie.

“Ernie!” Gus toasted the portrait with fine wine. “In this nice home with a big sectional couch, it’s like you never beat me!”

It took another bottle of red before Gus could forgive his brother. “And Thomas! I forgive you for hitting me with your Hot Wheels track at every opportunity. But you shouldn’t have made fun of me and the violin. And you should have let me play with your Hot Wheels set sometimes. Even once would have been good.”

Gus struggled to recall a happy memory of his estranged brother. However, his happiest day had been when he ran away from Ernie, Maria and Thomas to busk in the streets.
 

There were cans of food and each day Gus went out to find more. Each day, he made it his mission to help someone grieve. He found gloves and made a mask from tea towels and helped his neighbors burn the dead.

By day, he walked the streets around Central Park and played his violin by the funeral pyres. He shaved his beard and wore the Armani suits of his adopted father. The shiny shoes fit, too. Without the beard and cleaned up, Gus looked much younger. The street people who’d known him before the plague did not recognize him.

Each day had purpose. At night, alone in a quiet house with big, soft beds, Gus found God, too. Some of the grieving widows and widowers asked him to say a few words of comfort after he’d played
Air on the G string
or Vivaldi’s
Winter
(his favorite piece).
 

Gus had obliged with vague eulogies, stumbling at first. Then the words came to him and it was as if he was taking divine dictation. The words popped into his head and out of his mouth. The grieving families nodded as they wept. Death, he discovered, invites powerful poetry.

He began carrying a bible and reading it everywhere he went. He’d found it in the night table drawer beside the big-haired mom’s dead vibrator.

Survivors in the neighborhood began to call him the Central Park street preacher. They began to ask for his comforting words more than they wanted his violin. By the time his unused violin was out of tune and the carpal tunnel pain cleared up, Gus realized he’d taken his dead doctor’s advice. He’d found another job.

Then Gus lost everything again when the
Mars
bore down on Pier 11.
 

L
AMENT
THE
LIVING
AND
THEIR
POOR
DEAD
CHOICES

T
he road east was impassable. Whoever ran the tanks or bulldozers had abandoned their task. The Spencers were again pushed farther north. Little towns along the route had become ghost towns. Death waited in those towns, either by Sutr-X or at the hands of the survivors. Town signs declared:
Refugees not welcome! Go or die!

Several hamlets they passed stacked bodies under their welcome signs, apparently as a demonstration. Blackened skeletons, twisted together in macabre heaps, lay so deep it was unclear where one body ended and another began.

As they motored through little towns, signs along the road told them not to get out of their vehicle. At night, though motels and houses appeared empty, Jack refused to give up the wheel for the comfort of a mattress.
 

When they stopped, she dozed in her seat. “If we leave the van, it’s vulnerable. We’ve got all our supplies in it. We aren’t leaving it for anything. I don’t want to fall asleep in a motel and wake up to find the van’s gone or we’re surrounded.”

Since the roadblock, the traffic changed within the space of a few hundred miles. They rarely saw anyone walking or driving. In towns they passed through, there was evidence people still lived there. However, no one stood outside waving as they had to the south.
 

Wildlife (every creature from foxes to birds) seemed to have received some signal that the way was safe for them. Unhindered by humans, packs of dogs roamed the streets. Sometimes packs chased the van for a short time before giving up.
 

When we get to Theo’s dad’s farm, will it even be there?
Jack wondered.