* * *
Dr. Jianjun Seong reached out and pulled Shiva aboard the helicopter. She greeted him with a warm smile and embraced him. “My sweet little brother-in-arms!”
As soon as she belted in and put the big headphones on her head, Seong ordered the pilot to take off. Two more passengers — an Asian man and a swarthy woman wearing a hijab — sat in the helicopter’s cabin. All were dressed as if ready for a hike, except each wore a sidearm and automatic rifles sat on top of packs at their feet.
They all bowed their heads in her direction and then craned to watch the bloody carnage below in fascination.
“My queen,” Seong said, bowing lower than the rest. “History and a new future are made!”
She laughed. “Now, now, Brother Seong. There’ll be none of that in the new world order, thank you very much. That’s the sort of nonsense we’re getting away from. We are pioneers, not the rich descendants of ancient warlords like those parasites.”
Shiva pointed at the Buckingham Palace grounds below. “That’s what we’re getting away from, Brother Seong.” The battle was a boiling mass of dark shapes.
“It’s impossible to tell who’s infected and who isn’t from here,” Seong said. “Your new variant is impressive. It spreads so rapidly.”
“I call it Sutr-Z. The CDC told me you were dead, Brother.”
“They were supposed to think that. They still don’t know.”
“So? What’s the progress report? Give me your good news.”
Seong took his time answering. “Sadly, the course correction is not as large as we’d hoped.” He pulled out an iPad and flipped through screens until he came to the document he needed. “Hong Kong went down easily, as I predicted. With all the commerce and flights in and out, the first stage of Sutr spread satisfactorily in the first attack. However, Sutr-X was contained better than we anticipated on the mainland. It seems the Chinese government learned much from the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, Sister.”
“What are you saying?”
Even over the din of the rotors, Seong heard the hardness come into her voice. “The secondary attacks were very fruitful.” He pointed to statistics on a bar graph that showed the extermination numbers for farm animal populations. “I’m particularly pleased with the reductions in the cattle population.”
Shiva did not look as pleased. “I expected that we’d have a greater reduction in China’s chief product, Jianjun. How many Chinese were killed by the Sutr virus?”
“Millions by Sutr-X itself, Sister.”
She huffed. “Details.”
“Shenyang, Wenzhou, Ningbo, Baotou and, of course, my home city of Nanjing is gone. There were eight million in Nanjing alone.”
“Show me a graph, Brother Seong. Perhaps that will get us to the point faster.
The doctor switched screens and handed the iPad to her.
“Baotou is in Inner Mongolia with barely three million people. The fact that you even mention it shows how far from the mark you’ve missed.”
“The Party took drastic action to contain the outbreaks, but that also helped the cause. The good news I’ve been holding back, Sister, is that the Chinese government used nuclear weapons to contain the outbreaks. Nuclear weapons on our own land! Amazing, isn’t it? I didn’t expect them to be so sweeping and decisive.”
“This is disappointing. Your target was our prime concern. If you’d isolated Sutr-Z as I did, China’s surviving populace would be crawling over each other by now. I didn’t even control the whole lab, but I didn’t fail!”
“I apologize, Sister.”
“You know what this means, don’t you? We have to take some of the infected from here and take them all the way back to bloody China for a fresh attack. I’d planned to take America with you by my side, Seong. Now we have to go back and do the job right the second time.”
“Yes. I am sorry I won’t be able to join you, Sister, but I can do as you ask and this time I will succeed. The infected will carry Sutr-Z to every corner of China.”
“You can do that? You’re sure?”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can, Jianjun. The community gave you your name because it means, He who builds an army.”
Seong nodded his appreciation and smiled.
Shiva pointed at one of the other passengers. “But can he do the job right the first time?”
The Asian man’s head snapped around. He gave a crisp nod. “We make history and a new future, Sister. I can do as you ask.”
Shiva slipped a long dirk from her sleeve and plunged the three-sided blade between Dr. Seong’s ninth and tenth ribs. His jaw dropped open as he tried to gasp. He could not. She gave the handle a ruthless twist and he stiffened. Blood gushed over her hands as she hit the release on Seong’s seatbelt and tipped him to the floor.“Tell the pilot to swing back around, hover low and open the door. We should feed my children a sweet little dessert.”
Seong still clung to life as she kicked him out of the helicopter and into the teeth of the madding crowd.
Pack your memories, grab a sword
Jacqueline Spencer tore her gaze from the widening gyres of vultures that filled the sky and climbed the stairs to her room. The Spencers had emptied their home of everything they felt was essential. Was this what it was gong to be like from now on? Empty city? Empty house? Empty life?
She scanned her bedroom. Of course, Theo shared it with her, but there could be no doubt it was hers and she just let him sleep there, allowing him a little closet space. The wallpaper had been her choice, as had the bed and furniture.
In sleep, Jack liked to spread out, allowing Theo just a quarter of the bed. Theo joked that in bed she made him feel like a woman. “You rip the covers away from me and push me to the edge. Thanks for letting me keep one butt cheek on the mattress, Jack.”
After the kids came along, he toasted their mother with, “One cheek!” without explanation and gave his wife a kiss. Theo’s toast to her: A tiny, happy ritual.
She wished he were sleeping with her now, but there was the issue of contagion. If they slept together, the virus might slip into her mouth and nose and throat and lungs as they slept. Of course, that may already have happened. Part of the virus’ power was that it seemed to have a long incubation period, infecting others while the carrier was still unaware they were sick.
Jack slept differently now, lighter and fitfully. She did not spread out her arms and legs to take over the bed. Instead, she curled up, alone and fetal, often awake and listening, straining, to hear any sounds of danger in the night.
They had watched the house carefully. Now that Theo was sick on the couch in Oliver’s front room, he felt useless. Watching his own house whenever he was awake was the only thing he could do. Still, Jack worried that Bently would come back, perhaps sneaking in the back of the house to destroy their garden out of spite.
She thought again how Bently had looked at Anna, ogling her and unashamed to do so in front of her family. That was the crux of it, she decided. He was a short, grimy little man, but he was not afraid. There was no law and order any more, no common conventions. Bently was dangerous simply because he didn’t care about those conventions anymore.
He’d openly broke the unspoken agreement everyone has. You don’t look at somebody’s daughter like that. He did and, despite running from an old man, Bently still stayed long enough to collect the cans of food, rolling on the ground. Hitting him had been like shooing away a vulture who wouldn’t leave a corpse alone. Even though threatened with superior force and numbers, he’d be back. He wouldn’t stay away if there was anything left he could take.
Jack hadn’t known mental exhaustion could cut her this deep. Stressed out too long, she thought. Even a lab rat forced to run in a maze gets to rest. She lay on her own bed in her own house and let out a deep sigh. The bed was stripped and the quilt she’d bought from a Mennonite woman at a farmer’s market was now across the street in Oliver’s house.
She bet those farm
women were set up nicely now. Fresh vegetables, horses and buggies for travel and root cellars full of everything they’d need. And a large group to protect them. The Mennonites and the Amish were ready for primitive conditions because their lives were always simple. Their community would work together. With so little contact with the regular world and its technology, they would barely notice the ravages of the world flu pandemic beyond what deaths might sweep through their community. Armed with their religion, they’d be better prepared to deal with funerals, too.
The Native American communities had some of the same advantages, but the reserves had been the dead canary in the coal mine in the early days as the Sutr Virus spread. Already unhealthy in many ways, flu had killed many more of them than whites, perhaps because contaminated water sources on reservations had weakened their immune systems.
Jack recalled from early news coverage, the Swine Flu pandemic had infected many more Indians on reserves than anywhere else. History had repeated itself, but nothing was done to protect the Indian population from the contagion. Lessons paid for at great cost had not been learned. She supposed the politicians responsible were probably safe in a bunker somewhere, though perhaps, they weren’t safe from their own decisions anymore.
But the highest-ranking politicians had family members they couldn’t take into a secure bunker. When the enemy is a virus, was there any such thing as “secure”? She supposed there could be, in some rarified circumstances, an army outpost under a mountain or a remote Center for Disease Control facility where everyone was jailed in plastic suits breathing artificial air all the time. The price of admission to that illusion of safety sounded too high.
What good was it to be a president or a senator or a prime minister if there was no one left to follow your orders? Were there still people taking orders, people so committed to duty that they’d carry on as if their families weren’t in danger? She supposed there must be. She hoped they existed. Whoever they might be, they would be as alien to her as any little-known exotic plant from Madagascar. She asked God to bless the research scientists and doctors and to provide an answer soon.
On Jack’s bedroom wall above the dresser hung a painting she’d created while she was pregnant with Jaimie. She preferred to paint in oils, but she was concerned about the toxins in oil paints and the elaborate cleanup the paint required. She’d switched to acrylic because she could simply clean her brushes with soap and water. It seemed a silly thing to have been overly cautious about now.
The small painting was a seascape. Smooth black rocks poked out of green water at low tide in Poeticule Bay. As an afterthought, she had stuck in a whale’s blue barnacled tail sticking out of the waves close to the shore. She’d grown up not far from that beach but had never once seen a whale there. However, the painting had asked for a whale tail. The process of creation, wherever that came from, required it. It was the whale’s tail that made her fall in love with that painting. It was her only painting that she had bothered to frame.
She had rushed out of the house with survival and Bently the Vulture on her mind. In the midst of panic, there was no room for art. “Scared widdle bunny wabbit,” she said to herself.
She took the picture from the wall. A rectangle of dust and unfaded paint told her exactly where it had hung. How could she have left without this? She had been afraid of Bently — she still was very much afraid of what he might do — but, except for Jaimie, they had all rabbited about in a panic.
Bently’s threat, the first of her life since schoolyard tiffs to be sure, had sent her running. How would her family deal with the challenges ahead if they couldn’t face down one scrawny man? The house was not on fire when they’d run across the street to Douglas Oliver’s house. She hadn’t thought to take her painting, or even a couple photo albums. Even people fleeing houses on fire thought to grab their kids’ baby pictures.
How deep would Sutr reach down into the fabric of what had been and tear with unforgiving teeth? How resilient was that fabric? Was civilization just a thin sheen of varnish over shiny, black claws of primal aggression? She knew Theo thought so, but she hoped her husband was wrong.
Perhaps that hope led her to the back of the closet in Jaimie’s bedroom. She knew it was the one place where her memory box would be safe from Anna’s prying eyes. The letters were still there in a large round cookie tin marked “Personal.” It was taped shut and it took Jack a few minutes of working with her thumbnail to pry up the yellowed, gummy tape. She hadn’t looked at any of these letters since before the kids were born…no, before she and Theo had even moved in together.
All the letters were from Theo to Jack. He’d always called her Jack, from the moment she’d introduced herself as Jacqueline. She had tied the envelopes in small bundles with lengths of red ribbon. It made her feel like she had been a silly girl. There was something Victorian and stupid about squirrelling this bit of their history away.
“In case of emergency, dig out tin and remind yourself you were young once,” she announced to the empty room.
Jaimie’s room was remarkably empty except for books stacked in neat piles on his desk. The room wasn’t big enough for an echo, but there was a definite ring of emptiness off the bare walls. Unlike every other teenage boy she’d ever met, there wasn’t a single poster. On her knees by Jaimie’s bed, she spread the love letters out before her in little piles arranged by date. The collection now seemed far more sad than she had anticipated when she’d dug them out from the rear of the closet’s top shelf.
Theo had written her long letters every day detailing how unhappy he was without her. He’d been planting trees in Oregon while she waitressed at Poeticule Bay’s Seafarer’s Pub.
All the letters were about missing her, professing love. Her then-boyfriend wrote about the physical pleasures they’d shared at Stanford. She supposed Anna felt those needs now when she thought of that dolt, Trent Howser.
Theo and Jack were apart all that summer and the next. He got a summer job as a house painter in Illinois from a college buddy and she stayed with an aunt in Bangor and temped in secretarial jobs.
The separation had been hard on them both, each worrying about the other’s summer temptations, wondering if their young romance could bear the weight of time between the beginning of April and the end of August. Each September when they reunited at Standford, they found their love had survived the time apart.
She paged through a few letters at random: One from June (depressed at their separation); another from July (an angry rant that his father had gotten him the painting job and how low the pay was.) The letters leading up to the end of August became more giddy. (Only 15 days left! was written on one envelope.) Theo wrote the number of days until their reunion on the same spot in small script under each stamp.
Some of the letters were, of course, pornographic, all in Theo’s rushed, slashing handwriting. She had given as good as she got, but when she asked him once where her letters to him went, he shrugged and said he’d thrown them away so no one else could read them. She’d been silent for two days after he told her that and he hadn’t understood how his lack of sentimentality could make her so angry.
Everyone older than e-mail, she supposed, must have letters they don’t want their children to read. No worries with Jaimie, there. She knew handwriting was as opaque to him as the printed word was hypnotic.
But what teenage girl, no matter how virtuous, wouldn’t read the letters from her father as a young man to her mother? Jack was afraid that, at best, Anna would invade her privacy and rationalize it by getting all gooey over how romantic her parents had been. Then, at an inopportune time — during an argument over Trent, for example— Anna would throw the letters in her face, reminding her mother that she was trying to deny her daughter the exquisite sex life she had enjoyed until Theo fell ill.
Jack reached for another letter at random. On the back, Theo had written S.W.A.K. “Sealed with a Kiss.” She kissed the back of the envelope now and began to cry. Sh
e couldn’t kiss her husband now, not without fear of inviting infection. Now that this simple pleasure was denied her, it seemed more important than ever that she be allowed the indulgence.
She threw the letters back in the tin, still sobbing with great heaving gasps. It wasn’t because she couldn’t kiss Theo that she cried now. It was because going through these old sweet and sexy letters now seemed like a morbid act, nostalgia transformed into something ugly. She felt like an old widow pouring over a dead husband’s correspondence.
It was then that she felt she wasn’t alone. There was a creak at the top of the stairs that she knew well. Whenever either of the kids got up at night to go to the bathroom, that floorboard creaked.
A month ago, Jack had stopped Theo in the middle of urgent but quiet lovemaking because she had detected a noise, so attuned were they to the squeaks and creaks of hallway floorboards. Anna, in a rare post-midnight bathroom trip, had gotten up to pee. Theo and Jack giggled and whispered, unwilling to continue until they could be reasonably sure Anna had returned to her room, oblivious to incriminating sounds from her parents’ room.
Another creak.
Had she locked the back door? She wasn’t sure. No, probably not, she decided. She was only going to be a moment but when she glanced at her watch she wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since she’d entered the house. It must be at least twenty-five minutes.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” She already knew the answer. For a moment she thought about hiding under the bed, but if the intruder hadn’t heard her crying already, he certainly knew she was in there now.
She cast about, but could see nothing that could be used as a weapon.
Creak!
This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) Page 23
