The Jakarta Pandemic

by Steven Konkoly

  “We’re really going to be dealing with them for the rest of the winter, aren’t we?”

  “Pretty much. I don’t see them going anywhere.”

  “They’ve really changed things for us,” she stated flatly.

  “Look on the positive side, maybe they’ve scared Todd and any of the remaining Fletcher haters out there. The loop has been pretty quiet.”

  “Yeah, but I feel like more of a prisoner than I did before. It was bad enough when it was just the flu and Todd’s crew, but now we can’t go outside, or stand near our windows without worrying about being shot. It’s ridiculous.” She walked back toward the main hallway.

  Alex followed her and wondered if they were both visible from the street. He doubted it, especially with the screens still in place. Kate stopped and turned around to face him.

  “This doesn’t bother you? You spend most of the day and night dressed like a commando, spying out of our windows, and talking to all of our equally stressed friends. How long do you want to live like this?” she said with her hands on her hips.

  “I don’t really see how I have a choice. Shooting them in cold blood on the streets isn’t the answer. It might solve the problem for now…”

  “I think it would completely get rid of the problem,” she said.

  Great.

  “Temporarily it might, but we’d still have a house full of women and children over there. We can’t exactly walk them at gunpoint to the end of the block and tell them to beat it.”

  “They can drive out of here.”

  “Nice. At some point we’ll have to answer for it.”

  “Answer to whom?” she asked.

  “I just can’t justify it, Kate,” he whispered. “Deep down I want to do it, but I can’t get past the fact that it would be murder.”

  “More like a preemptive strike. You said it yourself that it was only a matter of time before they kill or hurt someone around here. Nobody would hold it against any of you. Charlie…or Ed.”

  “I wouldn’t involve Ed,” he said, “and I’m not sure about Charlie. I’m worried that he’s way more talk than action.”

  “Hey, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want,” she said, cracking a smile.

  “Thanks, Rummy. Right now, I’m gonna keep watching, and we’ll figure something out. I don’t want to keep doing this all winter either.” He adjusted the rifle sling on his shoulder.

  “I just don’t think you should wait much longer. They have to be getting more and more desperate by the day, and it scares me to think that our house would be the ultimate prize for them, Alex.”

  “For anyone. That’s why I don’t think it’ll matter. Even if we get rid of them somehow, we won’t be able to let our guard down,” he said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “You’ll be able to let it down several levels. Before they showed up, I think you were just keeping yourself busy, and having some fun with it. It’s completely different now.”

  Alex grimaced. “Yeah, it’s very different,” he admitted.

  “You should enjoy a hot bath or a nice hot shower and then take a long nap. You look terrible, hon. I don’t know how long you can keep this up, but it’s starting to take a visible toll. I’ll rub your back, too,” she said, concerned.

  “I’m good for now with the shower. I still need to clear the snow. But I’ll take a little siesta after lunch.”

  “Don’t worry about the battery, we have a few days of sun coming our way. Take the shower. You need it,” she said, and with a devilish smile, added, “plus, you’re turning a little ripe.”

  “Nice. Always an ulterior motive.”

  “I do what I can to survive around here,” she said and headed back into the bedroom.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Wednesday, December 11, 2013

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” Kate said to Alex as he opened the door to the basement.

  Barley and bean stew again? Don’t wait for me.

  “I’ll be right up,” he called and headed down the stairs.

  The smell of baby powder hit his nose as he flipped on the light and headed straight to the bulkhead door. A paint can tied to a shoelace hung precariously from the end of the crude lock mechanism’s bolt. Even if an intruder managed to relock the door on the way out, there was no conceivable way for them to re-hang the paint can from the outside. Plus, the paint can’s lid was loosened and would likely open if the can was tipped, making a complete mess. The baby powder on the floor around the bulkhead door stairs served as the final, unavoidable telltale. A fine layer of powder extended in a roughly six-foot circumference around the base of the short abbreviated stairway.

  Undisturbed.

  Alex walked over and unlocked the bunker door, turning on the light as he stepped in. He glanced around quickly, noting that everything was the same as yesterday. He moved to the Power Cube and read the LED status indicator. Sixty-eight percent. Not as much as he had hoped. Three predominantly sunny days had given them about 15% of their charge back. Six days of constant cloud cover had drained nearly fifty percent of the charge, and he felt like they had been pretty conservative with their power use.

  A few more weather cycles like this, and the system will hit bottom.

  And every time it hits bottom, the batteries won’t hold as much charge during the next charge phase.

  It’s all a luxury anyway.

  He stepped away from the Power Cube and glanced at the oil tanks.

  Plenty in those.

  One more glance at the supply shelves, and he headed toward the door, locking both the door handle and the deadbolt before heading upstairs to dinner.

  Once he hit the kitchen, he admitted to himself that the stew smelled pretty good. The bowls were already arranged on the table, along with Kate’s recently invented pancake-style biscuits. Alex saw what was now known as the obligatory canned vegetable side dish in a small sauce pan that was set on a mat in the middle of the table.

  Dinner has come a long way.

  He couldn’t imagine what their neighbors were eating, and he didn’t want to think about it for very long. He followed Kate to the table and sat down. The kids were already seated and looked eager to eat. Just two months ago, they would have had to hire a bounty hunter to get them down to eat barley stew. Now the kids milled around the kitchen and great room before dinner. The days of unlimited snacks, fruit and juice drinks were long gone. The kids were actually hungry at meals and ate without the constant prodding that had become a daily dinner ritual for Kate and Alex.

  “Everything set downstairs?” Kate asked as she began ladling out the chunky brownish-tan stew.

  “Yeah. Good to go. The batteries are almost back to seventy percent,” he said. “Smells great, hon.”

  “Kinda looks gross, I know, but the lentils give off a brown brothy color. Not much I can do to dress it up. I threw in some carrots, but the orange chunks aren’t really helping.”

  “Looks good, Mom,” Ryan added reassuringly.

  “Thank you, my favorite little man,” Kate said, giving him an appreciative smile.

  Emily couldn’t contain herself. “He just said it looked like dia…”

  “Never mind, sweetie. It’ll be delicious, and we are very, very lucky to be eating this. Let’s thank the chef,” Alex interrupted before she could complete her sentence.

  Everyone thanked Kate at pretty much the same time.

  “Let’s eat up. Dinner’s a little late, and we need to close up shop down here,” she said.

  Alex heard spoons hitting soup bowls as he gazed at the long shadows cast by a few of the trees at the rear of their property line. He turned his head and looked across the table, past Kate and out of the great room windows. The sun had already ducked behind the Walkers’ house. Even without seeing the sun, he knew that it was probably only a few degrees over the artificial horizon formed by the thick trees to the southwest. They had about fifteen minutes to finish eating.

  “Is
seventy percent enough for the batteries?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah. We’ll be fine. I think we have a small storm brewing for later tomorrow and part of Friday, then some decent weather for the weekend. We should all make sure to take showers tonight, clean off. We might set the thermostats a little lower to keep the furnace from running as much,” he said.

  “They’re already set pretty low. Fifty-seven in our room,” Kate said.

  “I know. I don’t want to set that one any lower, but the heat keeps coming on at night. I can feel it seeping out behind our bed.”

  “Our room’s cold because it’s over the garage.”

  “I think if we take it down to fifty-four, we’ll be set. I got up to check the room temperature last night when the heat kicked on, and it hit fifty-six. I’ve never seen it below fifty-five in our room, even with the heat off. We’ll have to burrow in a little deeper under the covers.”

  “We can try it,” she said.

  She’s not buying into it.

  “So what are the two of you up to?” Alex asked, digging into his bowl of lumpy brown stew.

  “Nothing,” Emily said, “just reading a book on Mommy’s iPad.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Nothing much. Xbox. That’s about it.”

  “Anything good, sweetie?” he asked Emily.

  “Mommy downloaded like five of the Alissa Storm series books. I just started reading the series at the beginning of the school year.”

  “That’s the series where Alissa can time travel in her sleep, or something like that?”

  Ryan gave him a look.

  “What?” Alex asked.

  “She sees the future in her sleep, like a dream, and she learns to control how far in the future she sees and also what she sees. She solves mysteries, prevents disasters, stuff like that,” Emily explained.

  “Sounds cool, sweetie. Not a word from you,” he said and stared at Ryan, who was on the verge of what Alex could only presume was a statement likely to drive Emily to tears.

  “The books are middle school level reading. She’s really doing awesome. I’m going to download as many as possible before the service is interrupted,” Kate said.

  “You might want to get them all tonight, Mom. I keep losing my Xbox live connection. I think the internet is close to dead,” Ryan said.

  “Doesn’t surprise me. We might be living on whatever is recorded in the two DVRs,” Alex said.

  “That would kind of suck,” Ryan said.

  Alex just raised his eyebrows. Kate didn’t even notice a word that would have been censored from the kids’ vocabulary a month ago.

  “Maybe we should download some books for you, too. After dinner, we’ll sit down and you can pick some books,” Kate said.

  “Cool,” Ryan agreed.

  The light continued to drain from the room as the sun sunk further below the tree line, leaving an orange glow on the horizon to each side of the Walkers’ house.

  Not much time left here.

  “Let’s eat up and secure the perimeter. We can chat upstairs later. If the internet and cable is down, we’re gonna have more quality time together than either of you ever dreamed possible,” Alex said.

  “More Scrabble?” Emily asked.

  “And we might start to allow bad words, though that might put your mother at an unfair advantage.”

  “Nice,” she said.

  “Keep eating, guys. Upstairs in a few minutes, please,” Alex said. He caught Kate’s warm smile, and they both relaxed for a few moments.

  “Your cell phone’s ringing!” Kate yelled over the sound of automatic weapons fire and military radio transmissions.

  Alex put down the game controller and got up from the couch in their attic. “Pause it,” he said to Ryan and flew down the carpeted stairs.

  Kate stood at the bottom of the attic stairs. “I don’t think you guys should have that on so loud. Especially at night,” she said with an acutely serious face.

  “Yeah, I know. Where’s the phone?” he asked in a “what the hell” tone, glancing from her empty hands to her face.

  “On your nightstand. Where’s your machine gun?” she snapped right back.

  Great.

  Alex walked briskly toward the master suite. “It’s upstairs. I’m headed right back up,” he said, then muttered, “Couldn’t bring the goddamn phone…”

  “Do you think playing that game with the volume so high is a good idea?” she asked, following him.

  “Why are we fighting?” he asked. He heard the phone’s ringtone.

  “Because I’ve been calling you from the bedroom, and you’re up there blasting away at top volume with your son on that stupid Modern Warfare twenty-five game,” she said.

  The phone stopped ringing as he reached the bed. He turned around to face Kate. “Sorry, you’re right. We got carried away. It’s not a good idea, given our circumstances. Sorry. Seriously,” he said.

  “Thank you. Sorry to be a bitch.”

  Alex grabbed the phone and checked the caller ID.

  Charlie, and he called twice.

  “Charlie. And it’s three,” he said.

  She sat on the bed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Modern Warfare. They’re only up to number three.”

  “I know very well they’re only up to three. I was just giving you a glimpse of your very sad future. You’ll be playing Modern Warfare Twenty-Five when you’re in your seventies, and hopefully your son will have moved out by then.” She flashed a victorious grin.

  “I thought you wanted him to stay home forever?” he asked with a similar smile.

  “Not so the two of you can sit upstairs all day and night playing video games.”

  “Don’t worry. By seventy-five I won’t be able to make the trip. We’ll have to move the whole setup down here into the great room. Probably be in 3D by then. Surround sound. Some of those nice leather gaming chairs for my bad back,” he said, touching his lower back.

  “I think we need to consider the energy impact of running the Xbox and TV,” she said and lay back on the bed.

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Right after we consider banning hot showers,” he said and playfully pinched her left foot.

  She yanked her foot back with a stifled scream. Kate was deathly ticklish. The cell phone started to ring again.

  “You better pick up, or your redneck rampage buddy might fire a signal flare at our house to get your attention.”

  “Be nice to our friends.”

  “Are we gonna have to hang out with them when this is over?”

  “They might be the only friends we have left on the block. I foresee hunting trips and bison burger barbecues,” he said and answered the phone.

  “Hey, Charlie. Sorry I missed your first call. Busy with something.”

  Kate shook her head as Alex walked out of the room.

  “Alex, did you hear anything weird a few minutes ago?” he asked.

  Charlie’s voice sounded distant, almost muffled.

  “Hear what? Are you guys all right?” Alex asked, walking down the hall to the attic stairs.

  “Did you hear gunfire?” Charlie asked.

  “No, I didn’t hear anything. To be honest, I was upstairs playing a video game with Ryan. The whole neighborhood could have erupted in a gun battle, and I wouldn’t have heard it.”

  “You shouldn’t…” Charlie started.

  “I know. We got carried away. Kate already read me the Riot Act. What did you hear?”

  “Well, the girls were watching Iron Man 3 in the bedroom with the volume kinda low, and I thought I heard some kind of popping sounds. Like when you’re driving up the road at the Fish and Game club. I jumped up and turned off the TV, and by the time the girls quit bitching… I’m pretty sure I heard a shotgun blast.”

  He reached the top of the attic stairs and turned the corner. Ryan lifted up from the couch and nodded. Alex held out a finger and whispered to him, “Go ahead. I have to take care of something. And turn th
e volume down. Way down.”

  In the muted glow cast by the paused TV screen, Alex saw Ryan mouth okay and nod.

  “Did you see anything outside?” Alex asked Charlie.

  “No, I rushed everyone downstairs into the basement. I’m starting to think we should just stay down here at night,” he said.

  Alex grabbed his assault rifle and backpack, which were both leaned up against the back of the couch. The backpack contained his binoculars, night vision scope, and spare ammunition for both the rifle and the pistol. He headed back downstairs toward his office.

  “Probably not a bad idea if you think you heard shots. I don’t mean this to sound condescending, Charlie, but are you absolutely sure you heard gunshots?”

  “I’m pretty sure about the last two. It was pretty quiet in the room at that point…aside from some bullshit hysterics,” he said, raising his voice. His twin twelve-year-old girls were obviously within earshot. “My dad was reading in his room. He said it sounded like the Tet Offensive out there.”

  “Your dad was in Vietnam?” Alex asked.

  “No, and he can’t hear squat, but he swears he heard a gunfight. Small and hard calibers he says.”

  “Hard calibers? What does that mean?”

  Did he ride with Jesse James, too?

  “Hold on…what?” Charlie yelled.

  Alex heard someone yelling in the background, and then Charlie’s muffled voice. He yelled something about someone not being able to hear anything.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, then lowered his voice. “My dad is driving me crazy. Anyway, he heard booming shots and smaller ones, like sharp cracks. It’s what I thought I heard over the TV. Small pops followed by louder thumps. Shotguns.”

  “All right, we should take a look around. Use your night vision. I’ll take a look, too. I can’t see the Murrays’ house, so you should concentrate there,” Alex said.