The Grief Team

by Collins, David

  “It’s a sign!” she had declared and promptly pulled out a breast to allow Elias to suck. It was at that point, she would say—for she told the story often in the years before the viruses—that some in the crowd of mall-lookers turned against her and cursed her for the indecency of it.

  “They was pleased to have a front row seat to stare between my legs while I was bringin’ you along, but they reckoned a mom nursin’ her baby was a fuckin’ sin!” This story, told many times in Elias’ presence unfailingly unnerved him, partly because he was embarassed by his mother’s penchant for some of the more evocative, gutter words in life, and partly because he wished that she would sound her goddamn g’s.

  These days, his own standard of English had gradually succumbed to the same level. Indeed, he now realized that the shame he had felt for his mother was simply priggishness, that wisdom was in the knowing, and the knowing was that people respond more readily to a mix of jus’ plain folks and hard-ass workin’ than they do to lubricity and semantics. Elias knew that there was no more utilitarian a word than fuck. It scored as six parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and interjection. The articles and pronouns were of themselves, and as a preposition, he believed The fuckin’ house fuckin’-in the street satisfied.

  “Right time, right place,” his mother always joked when asked about the famous birth. “From that moment on, I knew that Elias would be the Mayor of the Malls, jus’ as he is today.” But Louise’s today was now yesterday; her ashes, prepared by the friendly staff at the Crematoria, now sat prominently on the small mantlepiece in Elias’ apartment where, on a regular basis, he had taken to hiding the ashes and subsequent remains of one of his daily perks: a Player’s filtered cigarette. Elias knew it wouldn’t have bothered Louise to discover that she was now little better than an ashtray...or so he told himself when his conscience pricked him. He had long ago forgiven himself for smoking. After so much death, dying of cigarettes was, as Louise would likely say, “a fuckin’ joke!”

  In his pre-morbidly-obese days, as a student at Oakville’s Trafalgar High School, Elias had achieved early recognition for himself. As a tough, savvy defenceman for the school’s varsity hockey team, his first accomplishment happened unexpectedly during a hockey game in his last season when one of his booming slapshots ricocheted off the Adam’s apple of the opposing goaltender and pursued an alternate course high into the stands where a large grey bulldog was standing. The bulldog, mascot of the opposing high school, received the frozen rubber projectile on the forehead just above an enormous, beady eye, killing it outright. A riot ensued as the students of the rival schools fought to protect their honour and their reputations for mindless violence, reaching a brief crescendo when it was learned that the goaltender had also expired.

  The police had been called and several arrests made, but there were no further significant injuries. Elias, who had expected to be charged with two murders, was told by the police and his hockey coach that the mascot’s death was unfortunate, but accidental, without any blame to be attached and, as for the goaltender, well, when all was said and done the kid was a sieve anyway and wouldn’t have made the draft. For months, Elias was recognized in the school hallways and avidly proclaimed as The Giant-Who-Slew-Two-With-One-Puck, as a result of which he felt only remorse and shame, turning to Mrs. Cooper’s Creamy Cupcakes, Ho-Ho’s, Mudpies, and a hundred other confections to assuage his feelings of guilt. He began gaining weight. Lots of it.

  Elias had been scouted by several U.S. undergraduate universities who ignored his poor academic standards and what was happening with his waistline and offered him 100% scholarships anyway; the least of which was worth $90,000 at the time. Elias declined and, upon graduation, applied for a full-time position at Oakville Place Mall. His part-time record of employment there—seven years of evenings and Saturday mornings—easily qualified him for the position of Assistant Mall Manager.

  Subsequently, it was during one of his walking tours of the mall that Elias became aware that, in turning down the scholarships, he had somehow provoked the interest of the editor of the local newspaper who, upon hearing the story over lunch about the jerk who passed on a shitload of scholarship money to work in a fuckin’ mall, sent a photographer who duly snapped several photographs of Elias speaking into his portable phone and pressing buttons on his pager. The story—“Local Teen A Loser, Say His Friends”—did a lot to increase Elias’ recognition factor and, for every one smartass with a caustic comment to fling at him, there were ten older, more sympathetic local shoppers who praised him for knowing something only age could teach.

  Know thyself, one woman said to him. Know thy place.

  Elias knew his place. It was in the Mall. And, in the days following the first furious, frantic reports concerning some sort of plague, Elias knew that he had been born for this very moment in history. When he first strapped on his standard issue pager as Assistant Manager of Oakville Place, he was already tipping the scales at 272 pounds, but his skating ability had given him a physical grace which lasted until he hit 300.

  His walkabouts through the mall soon became his raison d’être as hundreds, then thousands of citizens sought shelter from the coming Armageddon in the welcome arms of the Oakville Mall staff. Thus, Elias became a fixture in the local landscape of Mallshoppers, known for his humour and wit, his willingness to trade dirty jokes, and his equitable assistance to all when the Viruses struck.

  Two years later, in 2003, at age 20, Elias was appointed General Manager of Oakville Place, assuming command upon the death of George Braverman who had succumbed to Virus 3 only ten minutes before. It was then, Elias believed, that Fate played his ace, and the life and times of Elias Macdonald Kraft became fused with Richard Donalato, Mayor Dickie, the Father-of-the-Malls.

  SIX

  In the beginning, Jeffrey Meilgaard, the Norwegian Satan (heir to at least twenty-seven other morbid sobriquets), was thought to have concocted his home-made virus purely to obtain revenge against his ex-bosses and ex-fellow employees at the local Walmart in Tallahassee, Florida. A landed immigrant from Oslo and a doctoral candidate in microbiology, he had once worked as a laboratory assistant at the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta. He had been laid off from the CDC when budget cuts hit and suffered in reduced circumstances for some time; chiefly, because he’d also managed to get hooked on black grease, a highly-addictive by-product of crack cocaine. He was fired from his job at Walmart for slapping a nine-year-old boy who, having tried twelve different pairs of running shoes in the space of forty-five minutes, decided against a purchase. Meilgaard had slapped the little bastard all right but he had also thrown the little prick into a rack of cheap, imported boots. He was dismissed three minutes later, leaving him to stew back in his rancid apartment in the stifling August heat. When his last smear of black grease was history, he decided that it was time to return to Atlanta and visit his old friends at the Centre.

  Twelve hours later, cleaned up, fed up, and out of his mind, Jeffrey Meilgaard boldly went where few humans had ever been before; that is to say, directly into the Deadly Airborne Infectious Diseases laboratory in the sub-sub-basement of the complex. He managed to bypass each obstacle with the assistance of his newly-acquired Mac-10, requiring only seven shots, four deaths, and three purloined access cards in all to gain access. Once in the lab, he selected three vials at random, ignored their warning labels and, tipping them into a fourth vial, created a cocktail of virulence that, in their first human host, melded to become the beginning of the Replicating Viruses that would sweep the planet. Meilgaard, the incubator, walked out of the complex and drove to a nearby Walmart where, in under an hour, every man, woman, and child was dead.

  The symptoms were the same: a feeling of tightness in the chest area, then external signs of inflammation as nipples began to swell and itch painfully. Swelling of the neck and groin followed with copious dischargings of blood and mucus through the mouth, nose, ears, genitals, and rectum. Emergency crews, called to the scene by se
curity guards in the store who could barely believe what they were seeing on their monitors, noted in disgust that nearly all of the victims had clawed and torn their clothing, many ripping deep wounds in their chests before succumbing.

  The violence of the reactions surpassed belief in some instances as women literally tore off their breasts and men sent their thumbs deep into their mammalia until they punctured themselves. Children died within scant minutes, clawing at their purple faces. The emergency crews, all of whom experienced the same reaction within ten minutes of entering the store, died in the midst of those whose rescuers they were no longer. As did those in a second and third wave of emergency response teams. A fourth team, surveying the carnage, quickly shot and killed the sergeant who had ordered them inside and drove away.

  The news of the break-in at the C.D.C. and the catastrophe occurring at Walmart were linked by the horrified Chief of Police who, not feeling well as he directed operations in the Mobile Command Centre in the Walmart parking lot, managed to shout his hypothesis over the radio before he began clawing at his chest, his fingernails slicing through his shirt in his mania to tear off his nipples and reach inside himself.

  The number of dead in the Atlanta Walmart reached 3,401 (of whom 58 were emergency services personnel), and a quarantine was ordered within a three mile radius of the store. As CNN turned its cameras on itself, Jeffrey Meilgaard was driving back to Tallahassee, enjoying the first frantic reports on the radio and honking and waving at ambulances as they raced past him on the freeway on their way to certain death. Meilgaard, within whom the biological cocktail was now replicating itself, completed the drive in good time and parked in front of the main doors of the Tallahassee Walmart where he had, several hours before, sold shoes. The newly-hatched Virus 2 was released as ‘Walking Death’ headed for the toy section.

  It was another twenty-four hours before Meilgaard was identified as the carrier and his picture beamed everywhere. Within that time, the President had spoken to the nation from Air Force One where he and the members of his Cabinet had been moved as a precautionary measure. A national emergency was declared and the world watched as the hunt for Jeffrey Meilgaard moved from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, where he appeared in the men’s department of the Walmart there for less than three minutes (7,312 dead and rising) before leaving for Orlando (11,445 dead and rising) and Tampa (28,988 dead and rising).

  Faced with the gathering evidence that the virus was replicating itself into stronger and more virulent strains and, as authorities struggled to contain the infected areas, the President affirmed the order to create a five mile firebreak around each containment area, regardless of who or what was inside it. The fires, shown through the lenses of television network cameras to all parts of the globe, burned for weeks, unleashing black clouds of toxic smoke as refinery storage tanks exploded and burned, gas stations roared into flames, and the DuPont Paint Factory just outside Jacksonville erupted, levelling seven square miles of civilization in one awe-inspiring explosion heard as far away as Washington.

  Jeffrey Meilgaard, his face now eerily familiar to practically every citizen in the world, was finally recognized four hours later by security officials in Disney World. He was shot dead just outside the Enchanted Castle, but not before he had shaken hands with a giant mouse and his goofy friends.

  His legacy, continuously mutating and adapting, carved its own path of destruction, tagging along with the panicked hordes which began fleeing the cities. Weeks later, when Viruses 6, 7 and 8 appeared in China, India, Europe, and Africa, Meilgaard was nothing more than hundreds of tissue samples being handled with extreme caution by the few scientists remaining whose brains were capable of understanding the scientific horror of what they were seeing under their microscopes. Across the globe, microbiologists and experts on viruses were seized and isolated by authorities who immediately transported them in great secrecy to the United States to the Centre for Disease Control. There they were ordered under threat of death to find a cure.

  This gathering of the finest minds in the world on such matters was later seen to have been a colossal mistake when a delivery kid from Domino’s sent in Virus 2 with the pizzas. Effectively eliminating their only hope to save themselves, the President himself then paid the ultimate price, courtesy of a grief-stricken Secretary of State, who fired point-blank in the certain knowledge that he was killing Satan, the Anti-Christ, and a goddamn useless fucking Democrat to boot.

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, newly-mounted and fashionably-attired for the Millennium, began their infernal ride round the globe while conspiracy theories promulgated live over the television networks and local stations that managed to remain on the airwaves. The insane celerity of events forced world leaders to make rapid, gut decisions, some of which led to the immediate deployment of nuclear weapons. Despite the clear evidence that the Viruses had been hatched in America, the Indian Prime Minister was duly informed by his secret service that the virus had been secretly imported and released in Bombay by Pakistani agents. With 50,000 people succumbing every hour, the Prime Minister did not hesitate to act and, at 3:30 in the morning on August 23, 2003, Pakistan ceased to exist. Two days later, the Middle East vaporized in a massive exchange of warheads as the Israelis attacked Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and The Lebanon. Only Iran’s missiles flew in retaliation, but it was enough.

  In Cold Lake, Alberta, a French-Canadian general appeared live on the C.B.C. to announce that he was choosing that moment to strike a blow against decades of repression by English-Canada, self-destructing his stockpile of cruise missiles and leaving a crater similar in nature if not size to that known as the Grand Canyon. Radiation, that most significant of the after-effects of nuclear explosions, settled comfortably into the jet stream and, in the aftermath, added its own terrible tally to the number of deaths recruited by Virus 6, now the most virulent of the replicants first hatched by Jeffrey Meilgaard.

  In the U.S. Midwest, the White Guard, an underground supremacist movement, led the charge to stay ahead of the encroaching viruses and cut a swath of death all the way to the Californian coast. Los Angeles, after her own fashion, was raped and burned by her own citizens. Television images of the assault on the homes of the Hollywood rich were among the most gruesome digested by the remaining few who still happened to be watching television somewhere. The heads of two prominent Australian actors were hacked off by rioters and each forced onto metal spikes in their security fencing. The cast and crew of the hit show, Teen Innuendo, were immolated along with their live audience. And, if Los Angeles was in the throes of self-immolation, hundreds of other cities throughout North America were also caught in the bone-chilling, blood-thickening panic of Imminent-and-Certain-Death.

  The assassination of the Prime Minister of Canada by Lisa Bellinger, a psychopathic faith healer and spiritualist, took place during a two month lull in the spread of the Viruses when it appeared that Death was satiated. In an unpredictable turn-of-events, the Reformation Party of Canada seized control of the country in a well-prepared coup which saw seventy-nine members of the previous government hanged during a hasty period of trials and executions which lasted three days.

  In Quebec, separatists took up arms against the ursurpers and the First War of Canada began. It lasted eight days, culminating in simultaneous combined tank and infantry assaults against Montreal, Quebec City, and Trois Rivieres. Thousands died in a shoot-on-sight policy suggested by the leader of the Reformation Party who was, he believed, receiving his instructions from Jesus Christ himself. The ultimate insult, the sowing of salt into the Assembly Nationale, enraged the vast Asian community on Canada’s west coast, who saw themselves as the next target of the Reformists, and riots broke out in Vancouver and vicinity. This Second War of Canada was ended informally and rather abruptly three months later when Virus 8, newly-hatched, reached the waters of the Pacific.

  It was death, death, and more death.

  Enough for everybody. Enough for all.

  It was the en
d of civilization.

  The year was 2006.

  SEVEN

  Elias tilted his head back with some difficulty but he managed nonetheless to pop another oily sardine into his maw. The manually-driven can opener, called into play to negotiate the four rounded corners of the rectangular can of Connors Brothers sardines, also performed the function of fork, its broad single tine sleekly declining to a point that was perfect for stabbing the slimy little headless delicacies. Elias studied the can with some measure of detachment, his teeth macerating in a noisy symphony of pleasure.

  He had been to St. Andrew’s once when he was a youngster of 13, attending a summer hockey camp that he had enjoyed. Louise, who had remained in Oakville, always sent Elias back to his roots whenever she could. He had managed to lose his virginity, pumping away for all he was worth in one of the finest rooms in the nearby Algonquin Hotel. The recipient had been Linda-or-Lynn-Something, a college kid who earned money by making the beds, a task she performed quickly and expertly while Elias was putting his clothes back on. He had liked her very much, but never saw her again. He had asked about her, learned that she had been fired for screwing in the hotel’s bedrooms, and had felt remorse for a day or two, convinced that he had been the cause. He was too naive to imagine that other young gentlemen might also have been involved. Elias had returned to his home in Ontario a much older young man, and with the salt-fresh air of St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea in his blood.