by Glenn Cooper
Edison glared at all the raised arms and fixed his own wife and children with a death stare. They all kept their heads down and their hands lowered except for Brittany who said sweetly, “I like the baby.”
Villa told Edison that the congregation had voted as Jesus Christ himself would have voted, and asked Edison to leave the building. Edison responded by swearing up a storm, prompting Monica Snider, the pastor’s wife to cry out that blasphemers and bigots were not welcome in the Lord’s house. Edison gave her the finger and dragged his wife and kids out, never to return.
Starting that Monday, his beef business took a nosedive.
Edison climbed onto the mayor’s porch and patted one of the fat Greek columns. Joe was on the lawn, cradling his Remington, and Mickey was at his side, his hands deep in the pockets of his baggy jeans. Edison rang the doorbell four times before he heard someone unbolting the shiny black door.
Wally Mellon had a spray-painter’s mask covering his mouth and nose.
“You’re not wearing a mask, Blair. Get away from here.”
“You’ve got one, so don’t have a cow, Wally.”
Edison heard Mellon’s son, Craig, shouting from somewhere, “What the hell are the Edisons doing here?”
Joe saw Craig peering out of one of the upstairs windows and gave him a sick smile and a middle finger.
“Listen, Blair, my wife and I are up to our eyeballs in trouble. My two girls and one of my boys, Ryan, has the sickness. Craig’s wife’s got it too. I don’t have time for any of your BS.”
“That’s pretty fucking unneighborly, Wally, especially coming from the mayor of this town. What if I was to tell you that most of my family’s sick too and my oldest, Brian, is dead? Does that get your Christian juices flowing? Or is it only your family that’s important?”
“Did you come here to lecture me on my Christian bona fides?” the mayor said.
“No, Mr. Mayor, I came here to do this.”
The round from Edison’s Colt .45 hit Mellon at the midline of his bulging belly. His heart began to pump a fair share of his blood volume into his abdomen through the hole in his aorta. It didn’t take long for his body to go still on the welcome mat.
Joe calmly lifted his rifle to his shoulder and began walking toward the house, but Mickey froze in place and shouted, “Christ, Mr. Edison, why’d you shoot him?”
Edison maintained his tactical stance, keeping his pistol sights lined up in case Craig Mellon made an appearance.
He called back to Mickey, “What’s happening here is happening all over the country, son. Things are changing. This shit’s real.”
21
The power stayed off.
There was something primeval, even sinister about a darkness lit by fire alone, but when morning came and the candles were cold and puddled with wax, the outage didn’t seem as intimidating.
Jamie was up first and worked around the lack of electricity by lighting the propane barbecue grill, heating water for filter coffee, and making rounds of toast over the flame. He grunted at the empty bottle of gin in the trash, but when Linda awoke, she seemed chipper. She found him at the kitchen table making lists.
“How’d you make coffee?” she said, after trying a few light switches.
“Boy Scouts 101. Gas grill.”
“Impressive. Playing Santa?”
“How do you mean?”
“Making a list and checking it twice?”
“Pretty much. One list is food and general road gear. Another is my essentials. Then there’s Emma’s essentials. And finally, things I need from my lab.”
“I guess I better make a list too. After coffee.”
He had a midsize SUV and she had a sedan, so they decided to take his vehicle. While the girls slept, Jamie began to stage the move using the living room to make piles of stuff. He had never been much of a camper, but his wife, Carolyn was an enthusiast who had dragged them through the woods of New England. The sleeping bags, camping stoves, tents, trenching tools, hatchets, et cetera, were in the basement, untouched since before she died.
Linda assigned herself food gathering. She regarded the piles of camping gear with amusement.
“Geez, do we really need all this shit? What is it, a thousand miles? We can do that straight through, trading off driving.”
“I think we should be prepared for any eventuality.”
“You really are a Boy Scout.”
“I’m not. I like good hotels.”
“You bringing a lot of clothes?” she asked.
“Not a lot, but we’ll need cold-weather things. Who knows how long we’ll be in Indy?”
“We’ll have to stop at our place, if that’s the case.”
“Figured as much. Let’s get the girls up and fed.”
When Emma was young, the thought of a road trip would send her to the moon. As a teenager, he needed a cattle prod to get her into his car for any journey over an hour. Now, as she gobbled her toast and cold cereal, and he told her about getting in the car for a trip, she showed not a trace of comprehension.
“I need to pack your clothes,” he said.
She watched mutely as he threw her things into a suitcase. Normal teenage Emma would have never let him near her clothes and would have obsessed about her wardrobe for days. Sick Emma didn’t seem the least bit interested. He chose sensible items like jeans and T-shirts and sweaters, sneakers, a pair of boots, and plenty of underwear and socks. Her iPhone was by the bed, unused since she was stricken. He checked it; it still had power. He had lost count of the number of dozens of times he had asked her in recent years to put the damned thing down and get off Instagram or whatever, but now he would have given every penny he had to see her head down, tapping away. He optimistically threw the phone and a power cord into the roller-bag, zippered it, smiled at her, and got a towel to wipe the milk she’d spilled down her front lapping up the cereal.
“I love you, Emma.”
By candlelight, he had worked with her on the concept of love until she was too tired to keep her head up. Over and over, he would say, I love you, Emma, and give her a hug and kiss. Then he would put her arms around his neck and tell her to say, I love you, Daddy, but she didn’t make the leap. Kyra had watched suspiciously as he tried, and later, he told Linda that maybe she’d like to have a go with her too. She nodded in the dark and poured herself another drink.
He bent to pick up the suitcase.
“I love you, Daddy.”
He turned around to see her sitting there with arms extended. He threw himself to his knees, embraced her on the bed, and said, “I love you, Emma.”
She said it again. “I love you, Daddy.”
“You’re going to be all right, honey. Daddy will take care of you.”
When it was time to load the car, he took exception to the two bags of booze that Linda had packed.
“You got to be kidding me,” he said.
“Are we going to have this conversation again?” she asked.
“I think we should.”
She surprised him by asking about money and how much he was bringing. He said he probably had three hundred in cash and credit cards.
“Let’s say the power stays out,” she said. “Credit cards are worthless. And let’s say that people who’ve got something we want to buy aren’t interested in cash since it’s just fancy pieces of paper. Know what you’re left with? Barter. Trading for what people might want. Know what most people want? Alcohol. We’re taking all of it.”
It actually made sense. He said, “As long as you don’t drink the barter, I’m fine.”
With each trip to the car, he looked at his neighbor’s house for signs of activity. He hadn’t seen Jeff Murphy since he’d given him some food, and now that they were taking off, he felt a tug of conscience to check on him.
Linda came out as he was knocking on their front door.
“They’ve probably gone somewhere,” she said.
“One car in the driveway, one in the garage.”
The back door was locked too, so he cupped his hands, looked through the kitchen window, and called Murphy’s name. He noticed the latch wasn’t locked and slid the window up, bracing for a burglar alarm on backup battery power. It didn’t go off. He called out again and at the spur of the moment, he climbed through.
Murphy’s house had been built by the same developer as his to roughly the same floor plan. Jamie used a small room off the kitchen as a library. They used it as an office. The door was half-open.
“Hello?”
He gave it a little push, but it stopped on something.
He pushed harder.
The words escaped from Jamie’s mouth as a barely audible whisper. “Oh Jesus.”
He didn’t have a scintilla of doubt that Murphy’s wife was dead. Her abdomen was splayed open, her intestines and liver shredded. Murphy was beside her on the rug awash in blood, but not all of it was hers. He had deep bite marks to both arms and was gasping for air.
Linda saw Jamie when he ran out the front door and sat on Murphy’s stairs, staring into space.
Without a word, she walked past him into the house.
He heard one shot, then a second, and when she emerged, she sat down beside him.
“One was for her on the off chance she was still alive,” she said.
“She was dead.”
“Well, I’m not a doctor.”
“It’s awful,” he mumbled. “Maybe I should have—”
She cut him off. “Don’t beat yourself up. Look around this block. What do you think’s going on behind these closed doors? The shit’s hitting the fan all over the place and you can’t be everyone’s savior. You want to do some good, let’s hit the road.”
The cargo area of the SUV was stuffed, and the girls were belted in the back seat. Jamie did a last walk-through of the house, wondering if he’d ever return. Carolyn’s presence had been diluted over the years, but she was still very much there. There wasn’t room for the photo albums. From the living room, he took a single photo from a brass frame of two beaming young parents and their toddler opening presents under a Christmas tree.
Back at the car, she asked him how much gas he had. Half a tank wasn’t going to cut it. Without electricity, gas pumps were pretty much useless. She had him get an empty gas can and a garden hose from the basement and while he watched, she got to work cutting a length of hose with a switchblade.
“I thought they were illegal,” he said.
“Law-enforcement exemption, but I’m not sure anything’s illegal anymore.”
He was impressed how expertly she siphoned gas from her car into the can. When his tank was full, they took off.
Their first stop was at Linda’s house, where she ran in and returned a while later with two bags of clothes and a couple of winter coats. Jamie alerted her to a face in a ground-floor window.
It was brightly sunny, and she covered her eyes from the glare. “That’s my landlord. He’s got it for sure. He’s got the look. Fuck him. One more stop, okay?”
The Brookline Police Department was in the Public Safety Complex on Washington Street. Linda had Jamie pull around to the staff parking lot that was filled with idle cruisers. A few rear windows of the building were smashed out and he was careful not to drive over glass. Ordinarily she would enter using a card reader, but with the power gone, she used a backup key. As the minutes ticked on, Jamie could only wait nervously.
“I hungry,” Kyra suddenly said.
Jamie corrected her, saying it was, I’m hungry. After both of them said it properly, he rewarded them with Oreo cookies, the single best learning tool of his nascent educational career.
“Yum,” he said, patting his tummy, and they said, “yum,” and giggled.
Their sense of humor gave him hope.
Emma, I know you’re still in there, he thought.
The employee door swung open, but it wasn’t Linda who emerged. Two young men with bandanas and backpacks burst out in a wild rush. They made eye contact. He had the notion they might have accosted him if not for Linda, hot on their heels, handgun drawn, shouting that they’d better keep running.
Jamie put his window down.
“You know things are out of control when looters are inside the goddamn police station,” she panted. “I wasn’t quite finished. Take the gun until I get back.”
She got the message from his thrust-out lip.
“You’ve never shot a gun before, have you?”
“Never.”
“We can work on the fine points later, but all you’ve got to do with this particular pistol is point it at what you want to kill, pull the trigger, and keep pulling it until they die.”
He tried to leaven his anxiety. “I’ll return the favor by teaching you how to read a brain scan.”
He wasn’t sure if she was being concrete or bone-dry, when she responded, “Not nearly as useful.”
The next time she came back, she was carrying a heavy black tote bag. He doubted it would fit into the stuffed cargo compartment and got out of the car to see what had to be done to shift items around. He asked what was inside.
She told him she wanted the bag inside the passenger area at the girls’ feet and showed him why by unzipping it. It was full of boxes of ammo, two Glock pistols, identical to the one Jamie had been clutching in a moist hand, and two AR-15 assault rifles with scopes and replacement magazines.
“Do we need all this?” he said.
“I fucking hope not.”
Their last stop was his lab in Charlestown. Linda insisted on staying with the car and guarding it. He brought the girls with him and had them wait in his office while he got down to the tasks at hand. He tossed them a tennis ball and they began amusing themselves.
The building was still operating on its backup generator and his lab equipment was functional. Over the past few days he had succeeded in identifying two normal CREB variants that effectively displaced the mutant FAV CREB from memory gates. Unfortunately, neither of them had ever been peptide-sequenced, so that work would have to be done in Mandy’s lab with transported samples. But he couldn’t guarantee that the samples would remain frozen during the car ride. The solution was to freeze-dry them. He warmed the sample tubes in an agitating bath, and once thawed, he placed the tubes under vacuum in his lyophilizer. An hour later, he had two plastic tubes of freeze-dried powdered peptides that he bubble-wrapped and pocketed. He had a last look inside his –70ºC freezer and his heart sank. When the generator ran out of fuel, a decade-worth of research samples would be ruined.
He got the girls ready and turned off the lights, with no way of knowing if he was closing out this chapter of his life forever.
At best, his crystal ball was hazy.
22
The two of them had been friends since middle school, a couple of odd ducks who initially bonded for mutual protection against bullies, but remained friends past high school because they had no one else. One was white, one was black. One was fat, the other skinny. One was glib and cocky, the other laconic and painfully diffident.
Boris was the white, fat, cocksure one. Shaun was the black, thin, shy one. It seemed as if they were never apart. They shared a cheap, two-bedroom apartment in a run-down house in the near eastside of Indianapolis and did petty crimes to make the rent and buy some weed. People who knew them sneeringly called them BoShaun or the Siamese twins. They preferred BoShaun.
When the epidemic started, they stayed inside and refused to venture out, that is, until they had eaten the last flake of breakfast cereal and the last drop of milk in the house. Boris was a germaphobe anyway, which was surprising given the amount of fungus and grime in the bathroom and kitchen, and Shaun would have been happy if he never had to leave home. Give him a TV, his Xbox, and pizza delivery and he was set. When they did hit the bricks on the bicycles they had stolen one night from th
e downtown campus of Indiana University–Purdue University, Boris had them wrap their faces in so many layers of cloth, that he almost fainted off his bike.
“Fuck this shit,” Shaun said. “I can’t breathe, man.”
Boris chided him. “You want your brain to turn to Swiss cheese?”
“Not especially.”
“Then keep your breathing apparatus covered.”
Boris had a way with words.
The solution to safe looting and marauding was, to Boris, blazingly obvious. They needed better apparati for their apparati, which is why the duo were in the vanguard of looters at the Speedway Military Surplus Store. When Boris’s brick took out the big plate-glass window, Shaun lost his nerve at the alarm siren and hid across the street. But when the police didn’t respond, he joined Boris inside to see what he was up to.
Boris appeared from behind a display case, his giant round head encased in something grotesque.
“Fuck man,” Shaun said. “Don’t scare me.”
The mucus-green rubber mask covered his entire face. There were large oval lenses over the eyes and a screw-on filter disc at the snout. He looked like Kafka’s insect.
The mask muffled his deep voice. “It’s from Israel. The label says it’s NBC. That’s nuclear, biological, and chemical.”
“Which one’s the Swiss-cheese virus?” Shaun asked.
“Here’s a hint. It’s not nuclear or chemical. Here, catch.”
Shaun ripped his mask from its plastic bag. He did up the straps and asked how he looked.
“If we’re invaded by giant alien bugs, you might finally get laid.”
But Shaun had already wandered over to another display case with knives, bayonets, and machetes. It was locked, so he found a shelf of hand pickaxes. Since his eyes were protected, courtesy of the Israelis, he whacked the case with impunity, stuffed a couple of Marine Corps survival knives into his pockets, and held up a two-foot-long Colombian army machete for his pal to admire it.
