The writing was a complete mystery to Jaimie. He saw no words. The writing was not uniform enough in its cursive and italic loops and lines for him to decipher. Each writer’s intent and character was too varied for him to read. Where the others saw messages sprayed on the walls, he saw only abstract pictures, ciphers impossible to decode.
His sister, mother and neighbor could read the messages, however, and he could tell by their auras that their moods were plummeting the farther they walked along the wall.
Anna chewed her lip and held Jaimie’s hand tighter. Repent! read one message in day-glo green. Someone else had written over that in blood red: Lord have mercy! and a third tagger had written below that, Obviously, God don’t care.
A little further on stood several memorials. “Olivia, you were a good wife,” read one. That was in white and, unlike the others, written large to fill the height of the wall for several concrete panels. The tribute had been painted with a wide brush by a tall man.
Another simply read: Andrea. Why?
Another, more hopeful message told them: The Brickyard’s a safe refugee camp. Protected by good military. If you’re unarmed, you get in and get medical help.
Here and there, fading pictures of missing loved ones dotted the wall and fluttered in the breeze. A phone number was listed below a picture of a stunning redheaded woman wearing cat’s eye sunglasses. Heather Pritch, 29, separated at hospital. Came back for you. Will wait at train station. Tara.
The flyer, fixed to the wall with a scrap of twisted duct tape, looked like it would lose its tentative hold with the next breath of wind.
There were also a few with directions and warnings:
Todd, Meet Us At Deb’s, Love Beth.
Go around Chicago!
Detroit’s Burnt DOWN!
Army’s taken over Tahoe. They shoot all who approach.
Another read: Michigan has militia! but it wasn’t clear if that was a warning or a hopeful sign that somewhere there was order.
A more informative message read: Refugee Camps at NIAGRA FALLS has gone X. Many dead. Stay home and indoors. God bless.
Just before a gap in the wall ahead, a green winking ghoul admonished them with a pointing finger. ‘We want you!’ was scrawled over its grotesque head. Below a smeared wagging finger were the words: Not to Litter! Burn Your Evil Dead! It was signed, The Ungrateful Living.
At another spot, a column of numbers from one to 24 stood, each number exed out. The next number in the series jumped to 26. Beside the column were the words: Tally of Looters shot.
Jack and Anna and Oliver read each message with curiosity, growing more anxious with each step, but no one spoke.
The one that bothered Jack most was a large caricature in chalk, well-executed, of a smug-looking Edgar G. Robinson with a cigar stuck between thick lips. Jaimie recognized the face as an actor who played a gangster in movies his father loved.
The figure had a huge head atop a tiny body wearing a toga. It would have been comical except the words below it in neat purple sidewalk chalk read: Where’s your deliverer now, see? Where’s your deliverer now?!
Jack Spencer wanted to cry. Instead, she looked to the clear sky. She couldn’t look at the messages anymore. She forced a smile and surveyed the empty road to their right. “At least all those people who left got pretty far away. I was worried the road would be jammed.”
“The traffic snarls are farther south,” Oliver called over his shoulder. “I haven’t gone very far, but I did find a bicycle yesterday and got south as far as Oxford Street. The road is down to one narrow lane in some places but it was passable.”
“I wonder where all those people went?”
“I’m betting a bunch went up north. If you want to get away from people, you go to the trees. Lots of people own cottages, or know someone who owns one. And if you live in a tiny apartment, you didn’t have any room or money for building up a supply. They had to get out earlier, get somewhere where there was food. I’m sure a lot of ’em moved back in with their parents and hoped there were lots of cans of soup in the basement.”
“We were so lucky to have more warning about the Sutr Virus,” Jack said. If not for her brother-in-law’s letter, the Spencers might have been like so many others and trusted that, whatever the challenge, the established system would grind on through trouble. As they watched people spend wildly as Sutr hit, the bankers must have thought they’d get rich off the disaster and be paid later. She wondered where those bankers were now that every city was devastated by Sutr. Could the survivors start over and get back to that happy, ignorant and arrogant place? At the time, the transition seemed slow. Now piles of bodies were being burned — Jack assumed someone was still burning them, anyway. Funeral homes had been overwhelmed early, conceding they could handle no more only after their services were scheduled late into the night.
The truth was, everyone had had enough warning, but the signs were much easier to see in retrospect. It wasn’t just the growth of the Sutr Virus on other continents before it spread here that should have been sufficient warning. It was the obvious incompetence of those in charge, no matter how well-intentioned.
Images of the World Trade Center attack swirled through her mind. The Bush administration had been warned about Osama bin Laden, but took no steps to protect their citizens before the attack. The FBI had received warnings from flight schools of weird behavior from pilot trainees. When dangers are that clear in hindsight, somebody should have had some foresight.
The horrors of Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and the devastation of New Orleans had delivered a strong message that was largely unheeded: When the human waste hits the ceiling fan, we’re all splattered.
Only Jaimie looked back at the twisted ladder truck. He wanted to go for a ride in one of those fire trucks. He hoped they’d find one that wasn’t damaged.
Broken fire trucks make everyone sad, he thought.
They came to a break in the wall. A large house stood back from the road to their left. It looked out of place, a ramshackle three-storey surrounded by neighborhoods of single family dwellings. Some properties in the city’s north end occupied larger, irregular lots. This area had, not so long ago, been farmland on the city’s outskirts. Suburban sprawl swallowed these oversized properties. Most cornfields and orchards had been sold off to developers and divided up into a patchwork of tiny tracts for housing land. Subdivisions packed houses so tightly neighbors could hold hands across the space between the homes.
“Look at that,” Douglas Oliver said.
A screen door, ripped from its hinges, lay in the yard. The large, ornate front door stood ajar. Even from their vantage point on the sidewalk, it was clear the dark wood around the frame and the doorknob had been splintered white.
“Your boyfriend take up breaking and entering as a hobby you think?” Jack said.
“Mom!” Anna elbowed her mother in the ribs.
“Look closer,” the old man said. He pointed with his walking stick. Farther back on the circular driveway, a line of rats crossed the open ground from the hedge rimming the property, headed toward the house. Dozens ran across open ground in waves.
Anna’s hand, already so tight around his hand, squeezed even tighter and Jaimie pulled away to loosen her grip.
She looked his way and whispered “Sorry, Ears.”
He watched as a orange-yellow wave of revulsion moved up and down her spine. Anna shivered. “Gross!”
“Sutr isn’t our only problem,” Oliver said. He glanced at the others, “Looters, hunger, fire and packs of feral dogs and the current abominable state of access to Downton Abbey…”
“Yeah, we got 99 problems,” Anna agreed.
“A good thick, steak would be nice, too,” Jack said.
“You’re thinking of more to worry about?” Anna couldn’t take her gaze off the rats.
“I was thinking what comes next,” Oliver said.
“Not all the dead are getti
ng burned or buried. And nature is…well…nature. There are other, older plagues that tend to follow untended corpses.”
Yet another wave of rats followed their brothers and sisters toward the house.
They stood transfixed as another group of long brown rats scurried across the yard.
“They are the armies of the night,” Oliver said, “only it’s daylight and they are feeling bold.”
“All our food that isn’t in a can is stored in plastic,” Jack said.
“The fridge and freezer are empty and warm now, but maybe we should put the food in there as an added precaution, just so we don’t attract any vermin by the smell,” Anna suggested.
Oliver nodded. “And maybe we’ll scrounge up some rat traps or poison bait somewhere. At the mall, I’m hoping.”
“That’s something else that should have been on the list,” Jack said, “but I never would have thought of that in a million years. Should have thought of it. After 9/11, New York had rat traps everywhere. There was a burst in the rodent population with the increased food supply. First all the abandoned restaurants, then the rubble.”
“Mom! Enough!”
“I-I’m sorry,” Jack wiped her brow with her forearm. “I just should have thought these worst-case scenarios through. Everything’s so clear now.”
“I’m old,” Oliver said. “I understand. You get to a stage in life where you look backwards and you think it was pretty much inevitable that you’d wind up where you’re at.” He shrugged. “It’s always a surprise, anyway. It’s the curse of the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
“That’s how I feel right now,” Anna said, “like we’re all God’s unintended consequence.”
“You feel that way now,” her mother said, “but someday you’ll be telling your grandchildren about this trip to the mall. We’re all going to get through this and it’ll make a great story.”
“Moving on,” Anna said, taking the lead. She pulled Jaimie close to her side. “Disasters aren’t adventures when you’re in the middle of them,” she told her brother. “People add the romance to it later so they can rationalize away the crap-your-pants scared part.”
Two blocks behind them was home. Two blocks ahead was the mall.
“When I get to lie down tonight, I’m so tired, I don’t care if I wake up,” Oliver said.
“I want to go find Trent,” Anna said.
“And I just want to sit with my husband and nurse him back to health,” Jack added.
Jaimie longed for his big dictionary. He was curious to feel the sharp edges of the i and the soft black loops of the bs in the word bubonic. Bubonic was powerful. It smelled of a heavy organic rot that was sickly sweet, but the vowels felt gentle and pleasant as he formed the word in his mind.
They trudged on, ignoring the omens. They pushed their revulsion at the horrors of the wall away. They tried to forget the disgust and fear they felt at seeing hordes of greasy rats.
Each step felt like a bad investment they could not abandon. Each step felt heavier.
God's an absent father to a quiet son
The blackened mouth of the theater entrance showed them there had been a fire. Empty spaces stood where glass doors had been shattered. It looked like a skull with empty eye sockets.
They thought they’d need flashlights, but there was enough light leaking through the skylights that the mall was cast in the weak slanted light of early evening.
“Shoulda come at noon,” Oliver said. “It’d be brighter.”
“Should have,” Anna said as she stepped through an empty door frame, pulling Jaimie behind her. “At noon the advantage is with the mortals. Less light? Advantage: Vampires.”
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda stayed home,” Jack said. “Let’s just get in and out quick. Oliver, you’ve got the bear spray. You go first, fearless leader.” Jack stepped in front of her children and pointed the old man toward the mall’s gloom.
Shattered glass, discarded merchandise and garbage formed the edges of a broad path through the corridors. Looting was the aim of the first wave of invaders. As they made their way through the eerie quiet, it seemed thieves had turned to destruction.
“What do you think is left for us to steal?” Jack asked Oliver.
He shrugged. “Under these circumstances, it’s never stealing. We’re on a treasure hunt. Treasure doesn’t always look like treasure.”
The gloom deepened here and there where the skylights deserted them, but it was clear the jewellery store had been robbed clean. The gem cases were all smashed. The food court had been sacked thoroughly.
“That’s a shame,” Anna said. “I could really go for a coconut smoothie right about now. Or a latte.”
“I’m feeling hungry enough, some of those little plum sauce packets might do,” Jack added.
Far off, there came a sound on the edge of hearing. They all stopped, heads cocked, ears straining.
We’re like deer on the Discovery Channel, Jaimie thought, just before some animal with big fangs and claws runs them down.
They listened for a full minute before anyone broke the silence. “It’s the wind,” Oliver said.
Jack looked at him. “How do you figure that?”
“There must be a window broken somewhere, that’s all. It’s wind soughing through trees,” Oliver said.
Jack shook her head and turned to Anna. “Your ears are younger. What do you hear?”
“Angel song. It’s far off,” she said, shivering. “They’re singing a song of welcome.”
“Give me a break,” Oliver said.
“That’s what I hear.”
“Let’s just go a little bit further in. It’s a big mall. There’s bound to be other explorers here.”
“Looters,” Anna said.
Oliver waved his walking stick, urging them to follow. “We’ll leave a grateful note.”
Glass crunched under their shoes. Twenty paces farther, they stopped and listened, hearing nothing. Then, just as they moved forward again, the sound came louder. Far off, someone sang a light tuneless song, like a harp plucked randomly, occasionally falling into running scales.
Jaimie’s pant’s leg caught a wire hanger which was hooked into other hangers. The discarded clotheshangers scraped together like metal strings, clattering. The echo bounced down the corridor. All went silent, as if now someone was listening for them. Jaimie was sorry the music had disappeared. It was beautiful and familiar.
Jack spotted a bookstore ahead and signalled for everyone to wait while she entered its dark mouth. She was a few feet in before she pulled a flashlight from her pocket. She wished she’d opted for the long, heavy Maglite with the line of batteries in it. It could be used as a club, but she hadn’t wanted to carry more weight than was necessary.
As she played the beam up and down the bookstore shelves, she began to feel more calm. The store was largely untouched. The shelves seemed emptier than usual, but the store hadn’t suffered near the damage that other mall stores had.
“Everything okay, Mom?” Anna called. Jack looked back. The corridor was well-lighted by an overhead skylight. She could plainly see Oliver gesticulating madly for her daughter to be quiet. Watching the old man’s commanding self-possession desert him made her smile a little.
Theo would have called her feeling schadenfreude. She wished he was here now to help them through this expedition. Theo felt stocking up on books was just as important as laying in cans of food and bottles of water. Jack preferred to think the lack of destruction in the bookstore indicated the looters had shown the merchandise some respect. For her husband, the lack of looting here would be an ugly metaphor confirming the human race was irredeemable and largely illiterate.
“Mom?” Anna called again, pointedly ignoring Oliver.
“It’s all good,” she said loudly.
“Don’t try to be hip, Mom. That’s so old.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she yelled.
She sear
ched for maps, but that shelf stood bare. She started back toward the store entrance, thought better of it and went to the far wall. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for.
“Turn around, guys,” Jack told her children when she emerged from the blackness. She unzipped their backpacks. “Graduation presents,” she said. “It’s time Jaimie read Catcher and Anna, for you, I think you’re old enough to read Portnoy’s Complaint.”
“I read Catcher in the Rye already,” Anna said, “but Portnoy’s Complaint? Isn’t that an old person’s book?”
“It’s the funniest book you’ll ever read,” Jack said flatly. “Your father will be pleased.”
“I’m probably way past the time when I should have been introduced to it then,” Anna said in her wry, I-am-not-a-child tone.
An image of her daughter with Trent came up unbidden. She’s a healthy, pretty18 and Trent’s a good-looking idiot, Jack thought. Yes, she’d probably been protecting Anna too long.
Two of Anna’s schoolmates had had unplanned pregnancies. They’d had the condom talk when her daughter had turned fifteen, but Jack had hoped fervently that Anna had not used any of the box of condoms she handed her. Anna had uttered a disgusted, comforting “Ew!”, which pleased Jack. She promised her daughter she would never count the number of condoms in the box.
Such conventions and passages seemed a trite, almost silly convention now. The new world was born with the Sutr virus and safe, prolonged childhoods were at an end.
“If the book club is finished its meeting, could we get on with the fight for survival and all that?” Oliver said. “If it’s not too inconvenient?”
“Somebody needs to read a funny book,” Jack said.
“Sorry. Almost dying of Sutr must have made me cranky.”
They picked their way forward. The glass displays were all broken but someone had gone at the mess with a push broom. Farther on, the shards of glass had been pushed to the side and piled out of the way.
This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) Page 25
