Vampirus (Book 1) (6 page)

I have a healthy fear of the infected ones, of course, and particularly of their eerie dance of death in the streets. But what really worries me is the disintegration of society itself, of law and order. People are getting very desperate. And in
Wakefield (like most of Wisconsin) just about everyone has a gun or easy access to one. It’s only a matter of time before things got out of hand.

My sister Peggy
called from Milwaukee. She wanted to know how Sonja and Megan were doing. I told her the truth. Peggy said it was an absolute nightmare in Milwaukee. Martial law. The Army is patrolling the streets wearing biohazard gear, putting down riots by force and arresting anyone for the slightest infraction. Even gathering on the sidewalk in groups is illegal. Soldiers are breaking down doors, collecting the dead and arresting anyone who stands in their way. More than a few have been gunned down when they interfere. The bodies are taken outside the city to be disposed of. She claims there are huge pits where they are being cremated and you can see the trails of smoke in the sky day and night.

I told her it
’s pretty much the same in Wakefield.

It
’s pretty much the same all over.

She sent me a link to a YouTube Video that was pretty shocking. Apparently some college kids were out at night with a telephoto
video camera and they filmed soldiers in white Hazmat suits tossing bodies into burning pits. With Sonja and Megan slipping away, it was the last thing I wanted to be looking at. But I have this godawful feeling that I’ll be seeing it again and a little closer to home.

15

W
hile Megan slept, Luke sat with his wife and held her hand. Her temperature was elevated, but her hand was cool to the touch. Very smooth, unpleasantly clammy. He was shocked at how thin she had become, how the blood no longer touched her face but sought lower depths, leaving her skin with the pallor of the grave. She was pining away by the day and he was helpless to do anything about it. When she breathed, her chest trembled like a paper lantern. For about twenty minutes, she was awake, looking up at him with pale blue eyes and speaking a lot of gibberish about the fever dreams she’d been having. He got some beef broth into her and she held it down. That was all he could do for her and it made him hurt inside.

He drew the shades to keep the afternoon light out. As the disease progressed, Sonja had become increasingly sensitive to light. He noticed it with Megan, too. A shaft of direct sunlight
would make them squirm as if it were burning them.

This suggested things he refused to think about.

Though it made little sense, he was noticing that day by day there were more flies on the windows. It was strange in December. Sometimes bright sunshine streaming through the windows would waken a few and they’d crawl about, stupid from the cold. But not this many. He was killing dozens of them every day.

And what in Christ was that about?

Sonja was lucid for a few moments and all she cared about was Megan. “Is she better, Luke?” she asked in that frail, delicate voice that sounded like it might shatter at any moment. “Tell me she’s doing better. Tell me my baby is all right.”

She was practically begging him to lie to her. It broke his heart even though it was already in pieces. Sighing, he told her Megan was doing a bit better and it looked promising. Sonja smiled and closed her eyes. She knew it was a lie, but it gave her peace. Sometimes the truth cuts and wounds, but a nicely packaged lie can give comfort. It
’s something you can wrap yourself in and sleep in warmth. 

Luke knew that Sonja didn
’t give a damn about herself; all she cared about was Megan. She would have given her life without hesitation to keep Megan safe…just as he himself would have sacrificed his life in a second to save them both.

He was losing his family and there wasn
’t a fucking thing he could do about it. And the knowledge of that and the acceptance of it were like razor blades in his belly, cutting deeper by the day and forever hurting.

16

On December 10
th
, the Midwest got socked by the first real blizzard of the year. In Wakefield, it came down heavy and wet at first light as if it couldn’t make up its mind between freezing rain and snow. By eight a.m., there were six inches on the ground and well over a foot by noon. Luke pulled Sonja’s rocking chair up in front of the picture window and just watched it come down until the world was frosted white, the streets drifted over. Now and again he could hear a snowplow in the distance, but it never got anywhere near 13
th
Street.

Megan and Sonja were no better, much worse in fact.
He knew what was coming. He’d been steeling himself to it for weeks, but that did not make it easier or remotely palatable. His entire world was hovering on the brink of the grave and he was just waiting for it to get shoved in all the way.

Sonja had not woken up in two days.

His daughter was barely breathing.

He was exposed to them physically hour after hour every day, washing away their blood and vomit. H
e breathed the same air, exposing himself—purposefully, he was beginning to think—and never wore the surgical gloves and mask the hospital had supplied him with and yet the germ was not touching him.

Some might have thought themselves blessed.

But Luke was certain he was cursed.

17

He
was shoveling snow out of frustration rather than any need to keep the walks clear, when he heard a car pull up out front. He was working on the flagstone path that led from the back door to the alley. He heard boots crunching through the snow. When he came around front, he saw Billy McReady peering through the little window in the front door. He knocked, kept peering.

“
Hey, Billy,” Luke said.

He jumped.
“Luke,” he breathed. “Man, you gave me a start.”

“
Sorry. Don’t get many visitors these days.”

“
I bet. Glad to see you’re doing okay.”

Billy was the
County Sheriff and they’d gone to school together back in the day and smoked a lot of dope, something Billy never mentioned anymore. Wakefield did not have its own police force, they contracted with the Sheriff’s Office, and Billy worked out of the jailhouse downtown.

Leaning on his
shovel, flakes of snow drifting around, Luke shrugged. “I’m getting by, I guess. Want a cup of coffee?”

“
I could do with it.”

Billy followed him into the garage. Luke had a pot going. He poured them
both a cup and they sat on lawn chairs by the woodstove.

“
Mind if I smoke?” he said.

“
Go right ahead.”

They chatted for a bit. Luke told him about his
situation and how now it seemed that Megan and Sonja had slipped into some kind of coma and he didn’t expect they’d come out of it. Billy said his wife passed the week before. Luke was sorry to hear about it. Angela had been the leader of Megan’s Brownie troop a couple of years before.

“
I had her cremated,” Billy said. “I didn’t want her going into the pits. And I didn’t want something worse happening to her.”

What that was, he didn
’t say.

“
Lots of people are pulling out…but where are they going to go? All towns are the same now and some are worse than others.” He pulled off his cigarette. “My brother Joe is down in Sauk City.  It’s bad there. Real bad. Goddamn city is empty. He says you can knock on doors all day long and nobody ever answers ‘em. It’s getting like that here. A few people out today, but not many.”

Luke sipped his coffee. The same sick horror he
’d been feeling for days was filling his belly, rising up and wedging in his throat. He could barely swallow. “What’s it going to be like next week? Next month?”

“
A graveyard,” Billy said and would say no more about it. “I’ve been driving around today, knocking on a lot of doors. Basically just checking on people I know. You’re one of the few that was home.”

“
The others are home, too, Billy, but they’re dead or too sick to answer the door.”

He nodded. He had something clenched in his fist. He
’d been toying with it since he sat down, but he wouldn’t let Luke see what it was. But Luke knew: a rosary. Billy was gripping it like his life depended on it and maybe, just maybe, it did.

“
The Army has full authorization now to go into any house they want to collect the dead and the infected. They don’t need to knock,” he said. “If you see them coming up the street in one of their trucks, they’re probably coming for your girls.”

“
They can’t have them.”

He offered Luke
a sickly smile. “They’ll shoot you down.”

“
Sounds like a plan.”

They
sat there for a long time in uncomfortable silence. There were things Billy wanted to say. Maybe there were things Luke wanted to say, too, but neither of them had the guts to put their dread into words. Maybe that was a good thing. To talk about what they both feared would have been like confirmation of it.

“
What’s the rosary for?” Luke finally asked.

“It was my mother’s. She was a lapsed Catholic. We didn’t bury her with it. Makes me feel good, I guess, just to hang onto it. Especially at night. That’s when I need it most.”

Luke
wanted to ask him why, but he didn’t. He just couldn’t bear the idea of what he might have said. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear about any of it.

18

There was a knock on the door
that evening and Luke found Alger waiting out there. He knew it was bad news, of course, for when was it not? That awful worn hangdog look on Alger’s face told him all he needed to know because he’d seen it on so many faces by then.

Death.
That’s what you’re bringing me, isn’t it, Alger? When they come to my door it’s always death.

“
Is it Anne?” he said.

Alger nodded.

Luke pulled on his parka, Sorrels, and gloves, trudged over to the house next door. He saw no other life on 13
th
Street. Anne was in an upstairs bedroom and Luke was reminded so much of finding Linda King that he had to stop once and lean against the wall to steady his nerves. Alger seemed to understand perfectly.

Anne Stericki lay under the covers
, a heavy, moist, feverish heat in the air. Like Linda King, she did not look dead. Not really. She was white as alabaster, lips almost gray, but beyond the deathly pallor there was nothing. Just the same disturbing lack of traditional indications of death: no surface lividity or bruising, no rigor, nothing. And although she had no pulse or heartbeat and was not breathing, there was a faint warmth to her flesh. Luke opened her eyelids with his fingers and her eyes were translucent…not milky or dun as death can make them, or weird like Linda King’s, but shiny and wet and almost transparent. He didn’t like it.

When he lifted her head, a pencil-thin line of black juice
ran from the corner of her lips. It looked like India ink.

Luke didn
’t let Alger see this. “I’m sorry, man. She’s gone.”

Alger didn
’t fall apart and start screaming and crying like people do in the movies. Plague survivors were different when they lost a loved one; there was no shock, they knew death was coming. When you’d been watching its grim progress for days and weeks, you were not surprised when it arrived. So Alger just nodded and went downstairs. Luke covered Anne up, wrapping her in the sheets until she looked like some sterile mummy-like package.

“
Did you have the radio on today?” Alger asked when he got downstairs. Luke told him he hadn’t and Alger said that there was an Emergency Broadcast System bulletin on about every half an hour.

“
We’re under Martial Law, Luke,” he said, but Luke already knew that. “We’re not allowed to dispose of our…our dead. They have to be incinerated.”

“
At least they’re admitting it, I guess.”

“
They’re burning them out at the old
dump,”
he said, spitting out that last word as if it were green with maggots.

Luke understood the reasoning. Who didn
’t? Plague bodies were essentially vectors of disease and when you didn’t know what the exact disease was or how it disseminated itself and you couldn’t even fucking isolate it, then you had to proceed with the worst-case scenario: destroying the infection by burning the bodies. He understood all that just fine. But bringing the corpses of loved ones to the dump to be incinerated…there was something almost obscene about that.

Alger broke down crying for a couple minutes, then slugged down some whiskey and smoked a cigarette to steady his nerves.
“I don’t want her to go there, Luke. I can’t bear it. She’s all I’ve ever had. She’s been the only good thing in my small, frustrating, fucked up little world. Can you understand that?”