The Time of the Stripes

by Amanda Bridgeman

  Or what these things might have done to her.

  Or worse still, what they might have done to him during the blackout.

  He’d watched the disrupted telecasts, had checked the latest on the internet, saw the social media posts of politicians and celebrities from around the world praying for his town and asking for calm. He tried desperately to shake off the shock that threatened to take hold of him. He’d been mayor of Victoryville for barely six months. Now he was going to be the mayor that had to deal with this.

  Again the words “fight or flight” raced through his mind. He tried to look on the bright side of things. Weren’t great leaders forged in times of adversity? This could be his chance to prove himself. This could be his chance to stand up and be the leader he knew he could be; to be someone who left his mark in the annals of history.

  He was glad of the excuse to hold this meeting with the council and Chief of Police by conference call, since everyone was scattered across the town at their homes, dealing with what was left of their families. Russo’s skin was unmarked, and the truth of it was, the more the hours passed and the more he heard about these “stripes”, the more he didn’t want to go near anyone who had them. And his fellow councillors just might have them; if they were sick, he couldn’t be. If he got sick, he would lose control of his town.

  The recorded voice of the conference call service prompted him to say his name.

  “Mayor Russo,” he said, swinging around in his chair and staring out the window at the lights of Victoryville. His apartment wasn’t far from the center of town and the council chambers. He and Nicola were professionals, childless by choice, and they liked to experience the pleasures this life had to offer: travel, dining out, whatever they liked really. When they chose this apartment, they had done so because it was near their favorite restaurant in town: Segal’s. At least once a week they would stop by and visit their pal, Rory Segal, the owner, and then walk home arm in arm, their bellies full of pasta and their cheeks rosy from several glasses of red. They were trying to make the best of things here in Victoryville. They both wanted to be living back in Miami, Nicola especially, but after his father had died, and a stock market tumble had seen him lose more money than was comfortable, he’d had no choice but to move here and take over his father’s business. It was only supposed to be temporary, until he won a couple of lucrative contracts to help sell the business, but before he knew it he’d been sucked back into the life of the town of his birth, entrenched deeper into his father’s business, and seduced into life as mayor. He’d told Nicola it would only be for a little while. Just until he made the right connections to move up the ranks into state politics.

  As he listened to the recorded voice linking him into the conference call, he stared out the window and saw the red Segal’s sign in the near distance, alight against the black of the strange, strange night around it.

  “Mayor.” He heard the deep drawl of Chief Blackstone.

  “Chief,” Russo replied, “who else do we have?”

  “Graeme,” Councillor Graeme Shother announced, “and Patty, Jeff and Darryl.”

  “That’s it?” Russo asked.

  “I’ve called around,” Graeme said. “Bert, Helen and Marlie are among the missing.” Graeme’s voice softened as he spoke their names and a solemn silence settled down the line.

  “My god,” Russo said, running his hand over his face.

  “Have you spoken with the governor?” Chief Blackstone asked.

  “Yes,” Russo answered. “He wants us to encourage people to remain in their homes and stay calm while the authorities try to get to the bottom of what’s happened.”

  “People are already packing up and trying to head out of town,” Blackstone said.

  “Yeah, and go where?” Russo said. “The military have our town surrounded. There’s nowhere to go.”

  “I know,” Blackstone said. “Doesn’t stop them clogging the roads though, does it?”

  “Did the governor give you any other information?” Councillor Darryl Callaghan asked. Darryl was a good guy. They played golf together occasionally.

  “No, it’s too early. He said the military and various health agencies are on it and we’ll know more soon.”

  “We will,” Blackstone agreed. “Our new residents at Bateson Dermacell have been tasked with doing the initial investigation, given they’re here in ground zero.”

  Russo felt a satisfied smile cross his face. “Thank heavens we and Clivecorp supported their new facility being built here in town, hmm?”

  No one responded. Perhaps it was crass of him to gloat at a time like this, but given some of the negative remarks he’d had in the run-up to their grand opening, he couldn’t help but feel a little vindicated. After all, what would they be doing now if Bateson Dermacell hadn’t come to Victoryville? What would they be doing if he hadn’t supported the new business in this stagnant town?

  “So what do we do?” Councillor Patty Duke asked. Patty ran a beauty parlor—not the one Nicola went to—and was heavily involved in the local Chamber of Commerce. Russo thought she was a ballbreaker and a pain in the ass, but her constituents loved her.

  “For now we wait,” he said. “We just stay in our homes, remain calm and wait.”

  “People are losing it, Mike,” Councillor Jeff Williams said. “They’re terrified! How do people just disappear like that?” Jeff was a longtime councillor, but he was old-fashioned, outmoded. He rarely agreed with Russo’s progressive ideas, always wanting to keep the town just as it is. Scared of change. “I mean, we’re talking aliens here!” Jeff said. “Invasion of the goddamn body snatchers!”

  “The disappearances are one thing,” Graeme said, “but what about these stripes? What the hell do they mean? We could all still be at risk.”

  “Who among you is marked?” Russo asked, glad Graeme had been the one to bring it up. “Who has these stripes?”

  There was silence for a moment, before Blackstone answered.

  “I’m clear,” the chief said.

  “Me too,” Graeme answered.

  “I . . . I . . .” Patty stuttered, not sounding as confident as she usually was. “I have them.”

  “Me too,” Darryl said quietly. Russo’s shoulders slumped a little at the news.

  “Jeff?” Russo asked. “You?”

  There was a pause before he answered. “Yes. I have them.”

  Again silence filled the line as everyone contemplated this news.

  “Alright,” Russo said confidently, nodding to himself at the realization that he needed to take charge now. Not only was he the mayor, but he was unmarked. He was in no immediate danger. He swung his chair around to face his desk again. “Given the situation, we’ll continue to link by phone for updates until we know more. In order to move forward, with Bert missing, I’ll need one of you to step in as Acting Deputy Mayor.”

  “I’d be happy to,” Jeff said quickly. Russo suspected that Jeff was still a little bitter about his failure to be elected mayor even once, given his long time on the council. But even with half a council missing, Russo still didn’t think he was the man for the job.

  “Thanks, Jeff, but I think Graeme should do it,” Russo said. Given the gravity of the situation, Russo may need to hold some face to face meetings, and he couldn’t do that with someone marked until he was sure it was safe. Graeme, like himself, was unmarked.

  There was an awkward silence over the line.

  “Alright,” Jeff finally said. Thankfully he didn’t argue the point. Russo didn’t want to have to spell it out for him.

  “Graeme?” Russo said. “Is that alright with you?”

  “Yes, Mayor Russo. I’d be happy to step in.”

  “Good. Chief?” Russo queried.

  “Yeah?”

  “How many officers do you have left?”

  “Well, I’ve still got one of my deputies, but he’s marked. I’m waiting to hear back from the others.”

/>   Silence poured down the line for a moment.

  “If they were still here you would’ve heard from them,” Russo said, trying to sound compassionate.

  “Yeah,” Blackstone said with a relenting sigh, “I know.”

  “Well, you and your deputy should continue to run patrols and encourage people to stay off the street.”

  “My deputy’s on it. I’ll rejoin him when we’re done here. But we’re going to need help. Leo lost his baby boy, he needs to be with his family.”

  “As does everyone, chief,” Russo said. “Hopefully, we’ll have more clarity on the situation soon. Until then . . .” Russo thought for a moment, wanting to say something profound and inspirational, but what could he say that would make everything alright? Finally, he simply said, “Until then, stay safe,” he said. “I’m sure Bateson Dermacell will provide us with answers soon.”

  *

  Dr. Lysart Pellan stared at the screen showing the comparison samples.

  “They look normal,” said Cheung, who stood beside him. “How can they look normal?”

  Lysart glanced up at the graduate’s young face, sighing heavily. He looked back at the screen again, searching and searching for some kind of irregularity. But he could not find one.

  An incoming call sounded over the speakers in their lab. They’d lost count of how many there had been. They both sighed.

  “Disconnect it,” Lysart said.

  “Yes?” Cheung asked.

  “Yes. Harvey and the CDC have my cell phone. It’s just the media calling on the office line. Disconnect it.”

  “Yes, Dr. Pellan.”

  He watched Cheung leave the lab, happy to have a respite from the graduate looking over his shoulder and waiting for Lysart to magically solve the problem.

  Lysart slumped in his seat and ran his hands over his face.

  “Okay,” he told himself, “you can do this. Find the anomaly. Find it.”

  He straightened again and slid his chair over to a second screen. Just as he moved to look closely at the results displayed, his attention was caught by the light reflecting off a picture frame. He reached out for it and stared at the worn and prettily-faded picture of Ganesha within. With its magnificent elephant head, human body, and decorative dress, Ganesha was the patron of writers, travelers, students, commerce, and new projects. Ganesha was apparently also rather fond of sweets, and it was for this reason Lysart’s mother had bought him the picture when he was a child. He’d been a smart boy with a sweet tooth, and his mother had told him that Ganesha was well suited to be his patron.

  He’d kept the picture all these years to remind him of his mother: of her kindness, her sense of humor and her faith, but mostly of her pride in what he’d achieved through his studies and his work.

  He smiled at the image, then placed the frame back into position leaning against the wall.

  “I could use your help right now, Ganesha,” he said quietly. “I have a very big problem that I need to resolve.”

  He eyed the image for a moment, before returning his attention to the screen.

  *

  Abbie felt as though the night moved incredibly slowly, lasting hours more than it should. Whether that was because she’d lost a day somewhere, she wasn’t sure.

  She had wanted to go home, feeling uncomfortable in the Chalmer house, people whom she barely knew, but in the end she decided to stay the night. The truth was, she was scared to be alone, wondering if that thing would come back.

  They’d sat glued to the TV for hours, trying to watch through the static, but it was chaos and confusion and constant replays of the ship hovering over the town and then disappearing again. It was surreal to see a replay of a brief address the president had made to the world during the ship’s visitation, while Abbie had been lying unconscious on the VAC’s cafe floor.

  Pandemonium had been spreading across the world, everyone panicking that their town might be next. There were people buying up groceries and preparing their cellars. Groups were gathering in the streets, some praying, some demanding those in authority do something about it. But what could they do? The spaceship was gone.

  The questions crying out to be answered were flying around like a locust storm. They seemed to cram inside Abbie’s skull along with that constant mechanical noise being emitted from the TV. What the hell had happened to everyone? How did that ship sneak up on the town without any of the experts knowing? What did the mark on her face mean?

  Information had slowly filtered through to the news channels on the status of people within Victoryville. Abbie felt a sense of relief, in some ways, to see the exchange of information with the outside world; to hear reports that the military had been in contact with the Victoryville Chief of Police. The reporters on the outside spoke with such excitement when they announced that, yes, people were still alive in the town. But then they looked morose and concerned when reporting that many seemed to be missing, and that some of the survivors had been left with these long red marks, which only led to speculation as to whether the marks were a sign of an alien infection.

  Was it? Abbie wondered. Had she been infected with something? Was she going to die?

  Abbie studied the Chalmers carefully and thought about those she’d seen on the street earlier that day. The red stripes marked many of those who remained. This had to be important, because not everyone had them. Of those who did, they were just like Abbie’s: smooth welts that traveled from under their mouths, down over their chins, to the middle of their chests. Yet, of those who were marked, each were different. Where Abbie had only one stripe, Josh had three, his father had two. Upon first mention of a contagion, Josh’s father made his mother wear a scarf over her mouth and nose for protection, in case it was airborne, and gloves in case it was anything else. It was probably too late, but . . .

  And as the news crisscrossed from here to there, from one speculating expert to the next, and people of authority called for calm, Abbie kept looking out the window, over the street, hoping to see her family. Hoping to see her mother, father and sister drive up into the garage as if they’d just come home from the movies or something.

  Josh and his parents were doing the same: Karen desperately wondering where her youngest son was, her blue eyes filling with tears, her face almost constantly buried in her hands; a vision of shaking shoulders and short, caramel, wavy hair. His father Peter was more stoic, but Abbie could see the worry tightening his tall, slim frame.

  She and Josh eventually escaped upstairs to his room, wanting to get away from his mother’s intermittent sobbing. Abbie curled up on a big comfy chair, while Josh sat on his bed. At first they sat in silence, but they could still hear his mother crying, so Josh put on some music to blanket it out.

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” he said, shaking his head, as his troubled eyes roved around the room. “Missing only one member of your family, or missing all of them.”

  Abbie stared at him, then looked back at her house across the street, so empty, so eerily quiet. Her mind’s eye pictured her sister, Sarah, talking on the phone to her friends, the music channel blaring on the TV in the background; her sister had been in her final year of high school, her whole life ahead of her. She pictured her mother sitting on the porch in the sun, sipping a glass of wine and reading some exotic paperback. She imagined her father in the kitchen, trying to make some fancy dish like those TV chefs did, trying to make himself useful while he was out of work. She pictured herself in her room trying to study for her university exams, trying not to let herself gaze through the window at the new guy who’d moved in with his family across the street.

  Abbie’s family were working class, and after her father had been laid off from his sales job, they couldn’t afford to send her to live in the city to attend university any more. At first she’d been bummed not to be able to follow a lot of her classmates out of town, but she got used to it. Although seeing their Facebook posts from time to time cut her a little. She
’d been studying by correspondence part-time and working part-time ever since. She had one semester left before graduation. Just one semester until she could move on with the rest of her life, before she could get a full-time job and join her friends.

  But now?

  Now, sitting in Josh’s middle-class bedroom, she stared at him and thought how weird it was to be here. They’d lived across the street from each other for the past couple weeks, had both worked part-time at the VAC, and they’d both lined up for lunch at Mona’s Cafe. But other than the occasional nod hello, that was it. Friendly strangers. Until the day before, when he’d asked to sit at her table in the busy cafe and they’d talked.

  They hadn’t talked long, maybe thirty minutes, before she’d had to go teach another class. She’d discovered his family had come from Boston, he was twenty-one, a marketing graduate, and he was currently deciding what to do with his life; working a couple of part-time jobs and living with his folks while he figured it out. It turned out his father had grown up in these parts.

  Still, it seemed odd to be suddenly sitting in Josh’s room, his personal space, having barely said a word to him before yesterday. And just like that, because of lining up for that chicken and gravy roll lunch together, she was now here in his house being sheltered like some abandoned orphan.

  Abbie stared at her empty house across the street again. She was grateful for the generosity of these strangers, but at the same time she felt she should be at home, and berated herself for not being more brave. She was supposed to be an adult, but right now she felt like a scared child.

  A lump surfaced in her throat as she tried not to think about her family and what might have happened to them. Hoping upon hope that something bad hadn’t happened to them. Because if it had, that meant she was now alone.

  *

  Richard Keene, after filing his report to Harry Dean, had sat glued to the TV, the internet and the phone throughout the afternoon, soaking up as much information as he could via the scattered and disrupted telecasts, taking notes on everything. Even as tiredness set in, and that mechanical noise emitting from the TV started to drive him as crazy as if it was a fly buzzing around his head, he couldn’t stop watching or scrolling through the social media feeds.