This Plague of Days, Season Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (3 page)

She got to the better light of the family room and looked out the window. She could see Anna leaning up against the driver’s side window, watching for her mother but looking for enemies, as well. Anna’s right hand hovered over the van’s horn.

She was sure Jaimie’s eyes were on the dictionary in his lap. He wouldn’t move except to turn the page. Most of the time, it seemed her son was made of impenetrable rock. She envied Jaimie his world. Exposed to horror and loss, he’d take it in as more information. Her son, the moron. Her son, the robot. Her son whom some kids called Ears and Retard. Jaimie was above all this blood.
 

Her family waited for her, safe for now, but less safe for indulging this ghoulish goodbye. But there was no goodbye to that memory was there? The scene in the bathroom would visit again when she slept, Jack was sure. She’d get the awful reward of that bad investment over and over in the years to come, if she lived that long.

Brandy would come as a familiar ghost in nightmares, asking for company. “It’s lonely in the bathtub,” she would say. “That bathtub was a lonely place to lay down and die after I killed Tom. Come join me in the bathtub, Jack. It doesn’t hurt long and then you go to sleep. Sleep with me until the end of time. When time ends, we’ll have bubbly champagne in heaven.”

I’m not going to cry anymore,
Jack thought.
Or I’ll cry someday, a long time from now. I don’t have time now. I’m sorry, Brandy, I can’t afford to cry anymore. Not now. When I can, I will. I promise.

The phrase “slit your wrists” is so common, she thought, she would have expected both Brandy’s wrists to be slashed. When you do it right on one arm — and from the looks of it, Brandy had been determined and thorough — you can’t slash the other wrist. Once you cut the tendons, you can’t hold the knife.

Unless you hold the blade in your teeth,
Jack thought.

There was an interesting detail she hoped she would never have occasion to use. But there might come a time when that factoid would be good to know. She tucked that thought away as she headed for the van.

Anna asked about Brandy and Ben, of course. Jack stared ahead and drove toward Fanshawe Park Road.
 

“Mom?”

“I think Ben died of Sutr, honey. I’m sorry.”

Anna closed her eyes and put her palms to her head, massaging her temples with her fingertips. A few minutes later they turned south on Highbury Road. Only then did Anna speak again. “What about his mom?”

“Anna…when things really go to hell, there are lots of things that can kill you besides an invisible virus.”

Highbury was an empty, straight strip south. Jack pressed the accelerator as hard as she dared.

Jaimie looked behind him, to the old woman draped across the third row of seats. Mrs. Bendham’s eyes were closed, but her lips moved in a whispered, repetitive chant. Her aura was red.

The boy decided she was saying the words, but she was too angry to be speaking to God. He wondered if she knew she was speaking to herself.

Jaimie looked to his father, seated beside him, still holding the boy’s hand. Theo Spencer’s eyes were closed, his chin on his chest as he rested. Though physically depleted, Jaimie could detect no sign of the disease and his aura was a vibrant mix of violet and purple. His father looked closer to God than Mrs. Bendham could reach with her urgent, angry prayers.

He’d seen the Sutr virus infect people. He’d noted how the first signs of contagion looked like greasy wasps, invading their victims’ energy fields. His father was pure again. Theo Spencer was safe.

Jaimie turned his attention back to his Latin dictionary. The first entry his gaze fell upon was:
mendacem memorem esse oportet
.
Liars should have good memories.

W
HEN
YOU
SEE
THE
TRUTH
BENEATH
THE
GUISE

A
s the Spencers turned on the highway, wrecks and abandoned cars squeezed the road down to one lane. Jack inhaled and exhaled faster and began to sweat. She was forced to a near stop to navigate around vehicles several times.

Decaying, empty-eyed corpses stared at them from behind glass. Though the spring days were still cool, the warm afternoons turned each dead vehicle into a sun-baked oven.

As they made their slow progress east, Jack second-guessed the escape plan. Trent Howler had wanted to take Anna with him to his parent’s cottage. Heading northwest might have been safer if Jack could have convinced the Howlers to take in the whole family.

Though his methods had proved disastrous, Jack was sure her conniving neighbor, Douglas Oliver, had been right to try to build a tribe. Jack had added Mrs. Bendham, their adopted, crazy neighbor lady. The rations the old woman had brought to the alliance were tucked safely away in a large cooler in the back of the van. If not for the preserves in that cooler, Jack wouldn’t have allowed the old woman on their desperate journey east.

Trent’s parents had refused to take the Spencers in at their cottage. The invitation had been reserved only for her daughter, based upon Anna and Trent’s tenuous high school romance. It was unfair of her, but Jack hated the Howlers no less for that.
 

Anna was young and healthy and smart. Her daughter could help them survive. But they had decided they were better off without her, Jaimie and Theo. The Howlers hadn’t given her family the courtesy of agonizing over the decision before pulling Trent back into their car and roaring off.

Yes, Jaimie wasn’t much of an asset in a survival situation, but he was human. If everyone pulled together and avoided panic, wasn’t that how things were supposed to work? So far, her real-life experience of the plague slapped that kumbaya theory stupid.

Movies reinforced a happy worldview by focussing on the heroes. Hollywood reinforced the idea that most people were heroes-in-waiting and the odd snivelling coward who endangered the herd died horribly. Fear always killed the coward in a satisfying way for the cheering audience. That’s the narrative that made those movies work. She hoped life would start imitating art soon.

Jack steered around a gas truck that had crashed into a school bus. Jack told her passengers not to look. The bus was black and yellow, the husk of a big burned bee on its side. There were children in there. Had been, anyway.
 

Where was the near God-like, incredibly lucky, muscled and photogenic hero to lead them to safety? Where was the white-coated team of brainiacs who would suddenly appear above them in fleets of helicopters, spraying some chemical cure that would eradicate the threat of Sutr-X forever?

What was God doing right now that was so much more important? Miracles and wonders would be so impressive and gain Him a lot of friends if He came out of retirement now.
Do that, and maybe even Theo would believe in God,
she thought.

Jack had been the believer in the family. With all she’d seen, she hoped this test of her faith would be over soon, before she failed. If she lost a child now, for instance, she was sure she’d accept Brandy’s invitation and follow her into the bathtub.

“Don’t test me more, God. Walk with me. I can not do this on my own,” Jack muttered.
 

Anna looked at her mother. “What?”

Jack hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until her daughter touched her arm. “Nothing. Try the radio.”

Several FM stations were broadcasting but after a few songs it was clear that these were old recordings. The machines were still working somewhere, playing cheerful music that reminded the refugees these were not those times.
 

Jack stomped on the brake and swerved to avoid a body in a narrow gap between abandoned cars. It had been a woman. Three large blackbirds tore into the gore of her open belly.
 

Jack blasted the van’s horn. The birds backed away a few feet, but did not fly. In their retreat, the birds revealed more horror. The dead woman lay on her back, swollen and decomposing. The corpse was too close to avoid being seen. What was seen could not be unseen.
 

One eye protruded, swollen in its socket. The other eye was missing, lost to the vultures. The tongue, too, was fat and stuck out at an angle from the yawning maw.
Then Jack spotted something worse.
 

In college, Jack had taken a course in Thanatology, the study of death. A cold description in a textbook resurfaced to describe the horror laid out before them. When a pregnant woman’s body decomposed, sometimes the gas swelled the body so much that the fetus was expelled. The term for this desecration was called a coffin birth.

“Everyone! Close your eyes! Close your eyes now and don’t open them until I tell you!”

Jack angled the van away from the corpse as sharply as she dared. Her right front fender scraped the bumper of a large abandoned truck. The gap was too narrow.

They bumped and thumped over some part of the corpse. Jack wished it was only the dead woman’s legs, but she knew better.

Perhaps,
she thought,
God is of no help because He must stay divine and pure. Maybe even God has to look away when the horror is too much.

They drove on as The Beach Boys sang about escaping to Kokomo.

T
HE
PUZZLE
IS
NOT
D
EATH
,
BUT
L
IFE
NEVERLASTING

T
he baby kicked and Shiva put her hand to her belly. Another kick, barely felt. As the container ship plowed through the North Atlantic, the ocean’s rock and roll made the child in her belly less frantic.
 

Shiva sighed and opened her eyes. “Still alive?” she mused. “Surprising, but good, I suppose. In the new future, it’s survival of the fittest. You might make it, after all. You might meet your father yet.”

A far off klaxon sounded and the speaker by Shiva’s head crackled. “Dear Sister?” It was Lijon, sounding nervous.

“I’m here.”

“Captain Price reports there is a British frigate off the port bow. They’re demanding to board us.”

“I assume he transmitted the code?”

“He did, but to pass the blockade, they’re insisting on an inspection to ensure the contagion is not spread abroad.”

“Very well. Put a squad of guards on the stateroom with Stanhope in it.”

“There are already four guards there, Dear Sister.”

“Is the thing still agitated?”

“No. They think he’s eating.”

“
Feeding
, you mean, Sister Lijon. It’s an animal now.”

“Yes, of course…Dear Sister.”

“The guards need to be ready to shoot the boarding party if they enter that area. I will meet the boarding party to ensure that isn’t necessary. I’m on my way. Tell the frigate they may send a small boarding party.”
 

“What if they want to send a large boarding party?”

Shiva could not conceal her irritation. “Deal with them as if you are in control and you will be! Tell them that if they want our trust and cooperation, they must demonstrate their trustworthiness and cooperation. For all we know, they’re pirates. Tell them that.”

“What if they are pirates?”

Shiva pulled her dress on, the fabric tight over her belly. “Lijon. We are making history, yes?”

“Yes, Dear Sister.”

“Who makes history, Lijon?”

“The predators.”

“And we’re making a better future, correct?”

“Of
course
, Dear Sister!”

“And who alone can do that?”

“The righteous.”

“So what do we have to fear from people whose only ideology is selfishness and fear?”

* * *
 

Rotor wash raked Shiva as she watched the Lynx helicopter land on the deck of the
Gaian Commander
. Four men wearing chemical masks and carrying rifles jumped from the helicopter and ran toward her. The masks were advanced, more like goldfish bowls than the cheap particle filtration and activated charcoal filters most military wore.

She gestured for the men to follow her. Shiva did not speak until they were away from helicopter. When she could be heard, she turned to give them a broad smile. “Welcome aboard my refugee ship, gentlemen! We’re unarmed, so please shoulder your weapons! You’re among friends!”

Behind the hardened plastic, the naval officer’s face was grim. He looked at her with piercing eyes. When he spoke, the hollow of his mask made his voice deep and authoritative. “We determine where we point our weapons, Miss — ”

Shiva opened her big coat. “It’s Missus, and not only are there children aboard, I have a baby on board.”

The man glanced down her body and gave a slight nod. “Congratulations, ma’am.”

She caressed her swollen belly. “We’re going to have to be very careful of the children. They are our future. I know that’s a cliche, but in times like these…well. We’ll need every one of them, won’t we?”

“Let’s get inside and out of the wind, ma’am!”

Once the door clanged behind them, the men crowded around her. “I’m Lieutenant Wiggins, ma’am. Who are you?”

Shiva stuck out her bare hand and he reluctantly shook it. If not for his gloves, he would have refused the gesture.

Shiva beamed her smile wider. “I’m Sherry Goldwater.” She reached into a pocket and produced a company identification card. “With Goldwater Investment Group.”

“And what do you do with the Goldwater Investment Group, exactly, ma’am?” Wiggins didn’t appear to warm to her charms.

“Tinfoil hat division,” she said. “My formal title was Risk Assessment and Management Director. A lot of people didn’t take me seriously until the Sutr-X virus started killing everyone.”

“That was lucky.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it! Most everyone on this ship would be dead if not for me. And if I weren’t Rube Goldwater’s daughter, I wouldn’t have been in a position to enact contingency plans and get this project up on its feet.”