by Platt, Sean
Dead Zero
Sean Platt
Johnny B. Truant
Copyright © 2020 by Sterling & Stone
All rights reserved.
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Contents
StoryStacks Sci-Fi Insider
1. Like Characters From a Fairy Tale
2. Routine and Urgent
3. Like a Sledgehammer
4. Good For You, Son
5. Rip Daddy
6. Paranoid Fantasies
7. Diagnosed With a Mental Illness
8. Government Plates
9. What If?
10. Radioactive With Abnormality
11. Not Like Detectives
12. Hemisphere
13. Guile
14. Exponential Growth
15. Stubborn
16. Kind of a Stretch
17. Mostly an Accident
18. What Bakersfield?
19. Don't Look
20. No Longer Fit to Pull the Trigger
21. Dead City
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One
Like Characters From a Fairy Tale
When he first saw the thing in his driveway, Jaron Giordina assumed his children were being assholes.
It was really no surprise. Things had always been this way. Len, the eldest, had been born on Leap Day as if to provoke his father’s OCD. Jaron had a blotter on his desk with a Cross pen set. The pen set had to be squared perfectly to the blotter. The blotter, in turn, needed to square with his collection of framed photos, his In/Out basket, and the Quote-a-Day calendar his nephew had gotten him for Christmas. When Len was born on February 29th, Jaron immediately started wondering how his birthdate might complicate his need for order and tidy loose ends.
A lot, it turned out — at least by Jaron’s standards. A surprising number of electronic forms turned out not to have February 29th as an option, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Right from the start, Jaron dreaded how he’d handle the issue of Len’s age. On his third March 1st, everyone agreed Len turned two — but it bothered Jaron that on the boy’s “birthday,” he was technically, sorta “two years and one day” instead. There was nothing orderly about it.
Amber had arrived shortly after Len turned three. The girl was a cat burglar and a cock-blocker. Not only could she get out of her crib and defeat all the baby-proofing Jaron and May threw at her, but she also timed her nighttime excursions for the occasions when Jaron and May were down to get frisky. If they had a nickel for every time their daughter arrived at the bedside during foreplay to ask Mommy and Daddy where her favorite toys had gone, the family would have at least enough nickels to buy a cage for the little brat.
So when Jaron discovered the tall and tattered thing in his driveway one evening after sunset, he assumed it was a Halloween decoration. May and the kids had dragged fake cobwebs over the bushes the weekend before and had even added an enormous spider whose legs wrapped the pillars. Len wanted to buy one of those welcome mat phantoms he’d seen in the Halloween Store to go with it. A seven-foot animatronic Grim Reaper that screamed and leaped whenever some poor schmuck stepped on a pressure-sensitive mat. Jaron said he vetoed the thing because it would make the neighborhood kids wet their pants (a plus in Len’s book), but the real reason was that it made him want to wet his pants, too. Jaron the Orderly was no fan of scares.
But now this had happened. Len and Amber must have manipulated May while he’d been at work. Now Jaron would have to deal with the horror in front of his home for two weeks or more. He’d have to use the garage to avoid it when he went out for walks, and he’d have to do it sneakily if he didn’t want his family to ridicule him. Either way, he sure as hell wasn’t going to go anywhere near it.
But of course, it was dark when Jaron got home from work and made his discovery, and the thing in the driveway was far more disturbing in the shadows than in daylight. Of course, the garage never had enough room for a car, so Jaron had to park in the driveway. And of course, May, who’d gone over his head to buy this pants-piss-inducer, had occupied the left side, leaving the right side open … adjacent to the Grim Reaper.
At least it was on his passenger side. At least he could slide out, then scamper for the door without having to walk within—
(Oh, just say it.)
—within reaching distance of the stupid, horrible thing.
But by the time Jaron made it to the garage, something not-quite-right was rattling inside his skull. Hadn’t the Grim Reaper been taller in the Halloween Store? And hadn’t its cloaks been sleek black, not shabby gray? It’d had a hood, not hair. And hadn’t Jaron seen the thing moving?
No. No, you definitely did not see it moving.
He didn’t want to look back, despite the inconsistencies. And he wouldn’t have, except that the idea of not doing so was suddenly much more horrifying. Jaron had dropped the keys into his pocket, but the door, after dark, would be locked. He’d have to dig them back out or ring the bell. Either way would allow plenty of time for Death to come up from behind and tap him on the shoulder.
Jaron knew how this worked. He’d been made to see horror movies before.
He waited for the motion sensor on the porch light to brighten his way, but that piece of shit had never worked right. He forced himself to turn.
Of course, the Grim Reaper was near the begonias instead of where he’d last seen it.
Jaron shrieked, dropping his briefcase atop May’s concrete swan.
“Ms. Schneider?”
Looking now, still with only the end-of-block streetlight for illumination, Jaron saw his mistake. It was Ms. Schneider (one of them, anyway), and not a decoration after all. But even after he spoke, the woman didn’t move. She had her arms at her sides, head somewhat down, a rat’s nest of long gray hair covering her like a shade to a lamp. She said nothing, but that wasn’t unusual. Politically incorrect or not, Jaron couldn’t help thinking of the Schneider triplets as spinsters.
They were identical and at least seventy, and they seemed to speak no English at all. If spinsters were still a thing, the Schneider sisters were it. They lived in a ramshackle house, just the three of them, and neighborhood kids were afraid to retrieve frisbees tossed into their yard. The house usually smelled like gingerbread. They never sold or gave any away — not to the neighborhood, nor at block-wide bake sales.
What did they do with all that gingerbread? Was it all they ate, like characters from a fairytale?
“Are you okay, Ms. Schneider? Is there anything I can help you with?” Jaron wanted to be more personable, but he couldn’t tell which one it was. They were Gerta, Betta, and Inga, and none of them ever spoke to anyone. May said it was cruel to treat them like witches; they were just lonely immigrants who’d never really left the ol
d country.
And they were odd, too — not scary strange like the kids said, but kind of sad. Rumor said some drug company had enrolled them in a trial that, though the promises were vague, Jaron somehow interpreted as positive for the neighborhood. He got a sense that if the trial worked, they’d be more social. It was true to Jaron’s halfway civility that he never actually asked what the drug did. Maybe it made them less crazy. That would be a step in the right direction.
But if that was its aim, then the drug wasn’t working. If Jaron didn’t know the woman had a face, he would have doubted it now. With all that ratty hair touching her shoulders, he could only see the Reaper he’d originally imagined. He could hear her rough breath but could only really see her bottom lip, hanging open, black in the nighttime air.
Jaron waved a hand behind him, refusing to move his eyes away from the visitor. He wanted the motion-activated porch light to come on, but it remained stubbornly off.
“Would you like me to call someone for you?” Jaron asked.
Nothing.
“I can walk you home if you’d like.”
He really hoped she wouldn’t choose now to wake up and get excited. On a list of things Jaron didn’t want to do tonight, walking one of the Schneiders three doors down to their gray-boarded house was number two. The only thing above it was peeling the skin off his body.
The figure kept on saying nothing.
“You sure I can’t get you anything?” She must have come to his house for a reason, after all.
But still, not a word.
“Well,” he said, “goodnight.”
Once through the door, Jaron locked it, then turned off the foyer light so he could peep through the glass. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the woman outside for a second.
“You’re late,” said May.
Jaron jumped a foot. She laughed, then seemed just a little worried.
“Jesus. You freaked me out.”
“By saying hello?”
“By …” He looked out again, but the woman was gone. “Never mind.”
They moved into the kitchen. Jaron dropped his briefcase on the island. May moved it off with an annoyed expression, same as always, then resumed chopping fat red peppers on a worn wooden board.
Jaron sat on one of the stools around the island. “Have you seen the Schneiders recently?”
May shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”
He looked toward the front door. “One of them was outside.”
“Outside?”
“In the driveway.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why.” He shook his head. “I think they’re going senile.”
“Which one was it?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it matters. I think they’re all going nuts.”
“That’s a bit ageist, don’t you think?”
Jaron didn’t think so. “Last week, I walked by, and they were watering their sidewalk. Two of them, with separate hoses.”
May gave a good-natured roll of her eyes. “That’s a European thing. They wash the stoop.”
“They weren’t washing. They were watering. The way you water plants.”
May flapped a hand. “Oh, pshaw.”
“I’m telling you … I wonder if I should call someone.”
“Why, because little old ladies are acting like little old ladies?”
They weren’t little. In their prime, the Schneiders had probably topped six feet. They were still as tall as Jaron was now. “What if they have that disease?”
“Which?” She wasn’t really listening.
“Rabies.”
“How would they get rabies?”
“You know what I mean. Not rabies rabies. I mean that other thing.”
“What, Rip Daddy?”
“Yeah. What if they have that, and they’re just going crazier and crazier?”
“That’s really between them and Molly.”
“Molly’s just Meals on Wheels. She’s—”
“She’s a nurse, is what she is. I talked to Priya the other day, and she was saying how Molly’s checking in on them now. I think the family may be trying to get them into some sort of eldercare facility.”
“Well. That’s good.”
“Unless you’re worried they’re going to spread it to the neighborhood.”
“Of course not.” But yes, that’s precisely what Jaron was thinking. Only after May’s words did he remember what people said about Rip Daddy. It looked scary and definitely could be, but by all accounts, it wasn’t transmissible. Those who got it seemed to rot from the inside, but not even once had any of the sufferers turned violent. Rip Daddy was a tragedy, not a threat.
Jaron knew that, and if he kept pushing this with May, she’d make him feel like a bigot. What had happened outside, if she was right, was like Jaron running scared from someone with any other affliction. Diabetes, autism, heart disease, clinical depression. If he didn’t change the subject, she’d start telling him he should be more compassionate. The poor women’s problems didn’t threaten all those lucky enough to be healthy, happy, and loved by family. The Schneiders, by all accounts, had none of those things outside of their little trio.
“When’s dinner?”
“I didn’t want to start until I was sure when you’d be back. We’ve got a bit.”
“Want help?”
“Sure. You can empty that.”
She pointed at the overflowing trash can.
“That’s Len’s job,” he said.
“Okay. Then go get him.”
Jaron took this as the taunt it was intended to be. Len was fourteen now and could only be separated from his video games by the jaws of life or the promise of pizza. Since they were having a pasta medley for dinner and Jaron didn’t feel like a fight, it would be easier to do the boy’s job for him.
He raised the lid and tugged out the bag, trying to pretend he didn’t see the disapproving way May looked at him. It wasn’t fair to be seen as spineless by your wife. Not after a hard day’s work. Where were his slippers? Where was his beer?
“Don’t you think it’s important for him to—”
“It’s just faster this way,” Jaron said.
He took the bag to the rear and tossed it into the alleyway can. The backyard was a mess. Len had also been shirking his lawn mowing duty, and Amber’s toys were so covered by the tall grass, he’d have to go spelunking for them before so much as starting the mower. Good luck getting such proactivity from Len, who hadn’t even had the initiative to be born on a day that came every year.
Sighing, Jaron looked through his home’s lit windows and, by their scant light, began to pick through the grass. He’d retrieved two trainer rollerskates and (of all things) the missing living room remote before turning toward the unsettling sound of something behind him.
Near one side of the short fence between yard and alley was Ms. Schneider again. Jaron startled and moved to head back inside, but his wife’s words clanged in his mind. She was a lonely old woman who hadn’t been in her right mind for a while. The darkness outside didn’t change that.
Jaron steeled himself and moved closer.
“Is it Gerta?”
She didn’t respond.
“Inga. You’re Inga, right?”
Still nothing. Jaron was wearing a smile he didn’t feel, trying to make his voice friendly.
“I guess that just leaves Betta. Is that you, Betta?”
She made a noise, like a groan. As she did, Jaron saw that lower lip again. It was slack, foamed with saliva. A runner dangled like a tiny mountaineer rappelling from her chin.
Rip Daddy. He knew it.
She had the bug, and even though Jaron knew it was harmless unless you managed to get it (and nobody really knew how that happened yet, but it wasn’t from proximity or contact), the presence of the disease so close to home freaked him out. There’d been around four hundred cases so far, but most of them had been on the opposite side of town. A few were in ot
her cities (mostly San Diego, San Francisco, and L.A., plus a few all the way on the East Coast), but folks here in Bakersfield had gotten the brunt of it. Why? It wasn’t clear. Something in the food, maybe — something sourced locally. Oranges? Grapes? Maybe walnuts. It’d just be spectacular if the latest autumn illness came from a bunch of stupid nuts. And now here was one of the local spinsters, dripping with the infection. It made Jaron feel like his family might be next.
He forced himself to move closer. “Ms. Schneider, are you feeling okay?”
She groaned again. This time her hands twitched.
“When’s the last time you’ve been to a doctor?”
Another groan, but she still hadn’t looked up.
“Look. Maybe this isn’t my place, but you know about this … this disease, I guess, that’s going around? Rip Daddy?”
Nothing. He opened the gate, moved into the narrow alley, and closed it again behind him.
“I know you and your sisters don’t go out much to, you know, get exposed, but they don’t know how people get it yet. Could be something you ate. You could all be sick if you’re sharing the same food.”
Her mouth seemed to have changed. A bit of a snarl, pissed at his presumption.
“Look. I just think maybe you should get checked out. I’ve heard on the news … The symptoms. Supposed to be like …” He was faltering before this unhelpful audience. He pantomimed rubbing drool off his lip. “Saliva. People produce a lot of saliva. And I can’t help but notice that you …”
A new noise came from behind him. Jaron startled; he thought she’d just teleported from one end of the alley to the other. But no, it was a second woman. Another of the sisters, dressed and looking exactly the same. Both were in nightgowns that looked torn and dusty, and only now did he notice their feet. Both were bare, and in the wan light, appeared near-black and covered in what seemed to be lesions.
