Apocalypse blues
( Xombies - 1 )
Walter Greatshell
Walter Greatshell
Apocalypse blues
CHAPTER ONE
My mother and I missed the news about Agent X because we spent most of that January cooped up in a beach bungalow outside Jerusalem, Rhode Island. Prior to that we had been living in Providence, stalking an elderly man Mum had tracked all the way from Anaheim, California-a man she contended was my father. I found her crusade embarrassing and pointless: If she had been foolish enough to get knocked up by an old goat who ran off the first chance he got, it was more an expression of her character than his. Having lived with her for seventeen years, I knew all too well what a pain in the ass she was. The guy had my sympathy.
When we began leafleting his Pawtucket neighborhood, the codger spooked and fled to his summer cottage by the sea.
"You can't get away from me that easily," Mum muttered nefariously, late into the night. "Oh no, buster. If that's what you think, you got another think coming. Yes indeedy." We had to pack up and leave our little Gano Street apartment during the wee hours of the morning, a drill I was quite familiar with after a lifetime of covert maneuvers.
"Isn't this fun?" Mum said breathlessly as we loaded the sputtering Corolla. Her eyes were bright and wild. It was cold.
"Oh, sure," I said. "What am I supposed to do with my bike?" I had just gotten it for Christmas-a new Huffy.
"Just leave it chained under the stairs, honey. We'll get it later."
That was the thing about her: She knew we would never set foot within a mile of this place again, not with all the back rent and utility bills we owed. Caches of our abandoned pets and possessions stretched from coast to coast, and she acted as if someday we would follow it all home like a trail of bread crumbs. Did she even realize we were butting up against the far side of North America? The only place left to run was the Atlantic Ocean.
In reply to my grinding contempt, she said, "Come on, sourpuss! It's an adventure! Show a little spirit!"
It wasn't hard to find off-season rentals in summer resorts. Owners of such properties were usually so happy to have winter tenants that they made no bones about leases, first and last, background, or credit histories. Add to that the discount rates, few nosy neighbors, and attractive, out-of-the-way locations that tended to discourage process servers, and you understand why such accommodations were a staple of ours. Poor old Mr. Fred Cowper had no idea that by retreating to the seaside, he'd all but put out the welcome mat.
Mum soon had us in a treeless village of white clapboard cottages strewn like apple crates across a grassy common. Bare clotheslines and backyard LPG tanks made up the view. It looked like a mining camp during the Gold Rush, or at least the abandoned remains of one. The sea wasn't exactly at our doorstep, but you could smell rotten eggs when the tide went out, and to me that meant clams, oysters, and other littoral delights, of which I was an avid hunter ever since reading Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, by Euell Gibbons. (Over the years, I had practically memorized the book, and still felt a guilty twinge every time I read the words PROPERTY OF OLIVER LAFARGE PUBLIC LIBRARY.) Aside from a few seldom-seen retirees like Cowper, and a house down the road occupied by hard-partying biker types, the place was a ghost town.
We didn't have a TV or a radio, not even in our car, because my mother couldn't bear commercials of any kind, and most popular music disturbed her chi. Instead, we relied on an old Capehart record player and her collection of movie-soundtrack albums, so that my childhood memories are all scored by Henry Mancini. Mum painted watercolor still lifes, and I wrote poetry in the style of Emily Dickinson, whom I identified with to a nearly pathological degree. Consequently, by the time we heard what was going on, it was already old news. Here is what happened:
It was the first week of the month, and Mum had gone to our P.O. box in Providence to retrieve and cash the interest check from my trust fund. This was money left for my care by her father, and it galled her no end that she had no control over the principal, which would be mine when I turned eighteen. For a period of several years she actually contested his will, an Ahab-like quest that almost drove her mad. Mum's ever-changing, grandiose plans for that money made me glad she couldn't get at it, though the shopping binge would have been fun. As it was, we had just enough to live on three weeks out of the month and ran up debts in the fourth.
On that particular fourth week, we had been subsisting on pancake mix, basmati rice, and whatever I could forage from the ocean, so I was looking forward to unpacking a carload of groceries and all the magazines we subscribed to. After weeks of picking over old ones, new magazines were like fresh meat. But I knew something was wrong when I didn't hear her get out of the car. The engine stopped, and she just sat there, as if formulating another bogus tale-I knew at once she had blown the money, or been conned out of it. Something. My bird chest constricted, and my eyes swam with tears of frustration: Not again.
But when she finally came in, I could tell it was something else. Something new. There were no groceries, and I was determined to be indignant, but the look on her face gave me a feeling I thought I had long outgrown: childish fright-the fright that only comes from seeing adults fall apart.
Clinging for dear life to my petulance, I demanded, "What happened?"
"Honey?" Her look was dreamy, detached. Unbalanced. "Something weird is going on."
"What? Shut the door, it's freezing in here."
"Lulu…"
I avoided looking at her. "What?" I said. "What's wrong?"
"I couldn't check the mail. Everything's blocked off."
"What do you mean? Why?" I thought she meant there had been road construction or an accident. That was it: She must have seen a terrible accident. Such things had disturbed her before. Once we passed a bad wreck while riding the bus, and she covered her eyes and moaned, "Oh, oh, oh," for long minutes, while the other passengers stared at us, and I tried to reassure her that the body under the bloody sheet was only covered up "to keep the sun off him" and that "I swore I saw him move."
Creepily blank, she said, "There's nobody out there. I couldn't even get to the highway. Traffic was all jammed up."
"I don't get it. There's nobody where?"
"Anywhere."
Growing impatient, I said, "You just said there was a lot of traffic."
"Yes." She looked at me, slowly nodding. I could see that she was vibrating like a scared kitten. As if correcting a preschooler, she said, "The cars are all abandoned, sweetie. They were all just left in the road."
I felt a twinge. "Give me a break," I said, annoyed by my own reaction. "You're just having an anxiety attack."
She seemed to catch her breath and get centered. Focusing on me in the hyperearnest way she knew I disliked, she said, "Lulu, honey, I don't mean to scare you. Dammit, sometimes I forget you're only seventeen. But I promise you I won't let anything happen to you. I know the last couple of years have been difficult, but this is different. This is not a hot flash."
I was completely lost, could only shrug helplessly.
"I stopped at the gas station on Route 1," she said. "There was no one there, but I found this." She set down her big Gua temalan bag and pulled out a Hello Kitty portable radio. "I also found cartons of army rations, MREs-they're in the trunk. All kinds of things were just lying around loose, and I started wandering the street trying to find someone. All I could think was terrorists, you know, maybe a bomb scare or something, and I thought we should know what to do. I couldn't find a soul. Then I got the bright idea to try the radio"-she shook her head, chewing on air for a second-"and, and I thought it was a prank or something. April Fools' Day. Only it's not." Her teeth had started chattering.
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My scalp bristled. "What? Mum, you're freaking me out!"
"They say if we just stay out of sight, we're safe…"
"Safe from what?"
She stared at me, wildly conflicted, then let it all spill out: "From women, honey. Sick women! It's called Agent X, but it's some kind of disease like rabies. It's a real epidemic. It infects everyone, but it starts with women. They're out there like-like Typhoid Mary or something, crazy, and if they catch you, you get it. Or you can also catch it from men, once they've been infected, but either way we're not supposed to go outside: 'Beware any aggressive, unusual, or disheveled-looking people. ' She giggled hysterically. "That's us, isn't it?"
With that it hit me that my mother had flipped. She was imagining all this, getting lost in some kind of paranoid, psychotic episode. The fear I had been feeling turned inside out and became an entirely different kind of terror, one bound up in pity and loneliness and infantile need. What was I going to do? I was still a minor-what would happen to me? Ward of the state? I had no relatives to take me in, we had no money. I could feel the tears spilling down my cheeks.
"Mum," I begged. "Come on. It's okay. It's going to be okay." I gingerly took her by the arm. "Come on. Come sit down and rest. You're okay. See? It's okay, you just need to take it easy. Everything's going to be fine…"
She was resisting my gentle attempts to pull her.
"What do you think you're doing?" she erupted at last. "I'm not crazy!" The way she said this-the wry edge to her voice-was so completely normal that it cut through the strangler vines of fear like a machete. I continued to try to lead her by the arm, but my own arms had gone wobbly, and she wouldn't budge.
"Come on," I insisted weakly.
"No. Lulu, let go." Somehow, she caught wind of the loony direction things had taken and cracked a smile.
"What's so funny?" I said, grinning back against my will. That opened the floodgates, and we were both wracked with weeping laughter, expelling the suffocating fear like bad air. After a few minutes, it died down, and we sat on the nubby orange couch to catch our breaths.
Mum got ahold of herself first. "Honey, I swear I'm not crazy. This is real. I wish it weren't, but it is."
Those words came as a cold soaking, though less utterly oppressive than before. "Okay," I said, wiping tears off my face. Then I frowned and shook my head. "Mum, I'm still confused. When did this happen? How long has it been going on?"
"I don't know, but it's all over the country, so it wasn't just overnight."
"All over the country!" Disbelief cushioned the blow. Part of me was still absolutely confident that this would all turn out to be a load of crap.
"That's what the people on the radio said: 'All population centers nationwide.' It's martial law, honey!"
"Well, what are we supposed to do? You said women carry it. Does that mean we're quarantined or something? Is there an inoculation we're supposed to get?"
"No, they just want us locked up."
"Are you kidding? What about men?"
"They said men can catch it from women, but I think it's all the same thing once you're infected. I'm sorry, baby; I couldn't make sense of it either. It didn't sound like they had a whole lot of information themselves."
"They must have said what to do. What if we come down with it? What are the symptoms?"
"They didn't say anything about that. Just that we're to stay indoors and keep listening to the radio."
"What if we get sick and have to go out for help?"
"They said not to go out for any reason."
"Well, that's nice. And what if some of those-what did you say it was?-Agent X women come knocking on our door? What do we do then?"
She could only shrug, saying, "We hide, I guess."
CHAPTER TWO
The MREs were actually not bad. The food was all right, but more than that, they exhibited a sense of fun that I wouldn't have credited to the military. Their olive drab wrappers concealed playful items like miniature bottles of Tabasco, instant cocoa mix, cookies, and candy. Each MRE had a little surprise of some kind, and for two days my mother and I did nothing but sit at the kitchen table with the radio squawking horrors between us, peeling open MREs at mealtimes and idly trading the contents. From time to time we would cry really hard.
This is what we heard on the one station we could find, repeated over and over in English and Spanish:
"This is the Emergency Broadcast Network. This is not a test. Repeat, this is not a test. You are listening to an official broadcast by your federal government. The epidemic of Maenad Cytosis, also known as Agent X, has infiltrated all but the most isolated pockets of the country. Because of a catastrophic breakdown of civil authority, a state of martial law has been declared, and all citizens are ordered to remain indoors so that comprehensive decontamination efforts may be undertaken. At this time, all population centers nationwide are under quarantine until further notice, and the interstate highway system remains closed to civilians. All government services have been suspended, and emergency officials have been moved to secure locations. A network of safe zones is being established for civilians, but until these are officially operational, no one may seek refuge outside of their homes. All civil-defense shelters, military facilities, and government compounds are classified as shoot-to-kill zones. This is for your protection. Do not approach military cordons. Stay inside. Barricade all windows and doors, and make every effort to give your dwelling an abandoned appearance. For your safety, all women must be segregated and contained, even if they do not exhibit symptoms of Maenad contagion. Once exposed to the airborne disease agent, they may change without warning, transmitting the contact form of Agent X to men and women alike. Beware any aggressive, unusual, or disheveled-looking people. Likewise, anyone with serious injuries or who is critically ill is a potential source of infection, as it is thought that their weakened immune systems make them vulnerable to the airborne pathogen. No matter how apparently weak, unconscious, or near death, they must be securely contained and treated with extreme caution. If you are low on food, water, or essential medical supplies, do not venture into the open, even if you hear military convoys or other official movement. All efforts are being made to come to your relief, but the scale of the crisis demands patience. You will be saved. Stay tuned to this station for news and official information. This is not a test."
The numbing sameness of the reports was frustrating, as well as the lack of specifics. It was like a tape loop that had been left playing. "They must be blowing everything all out of proportion," I said. "Are people dying like flies, or is it some kind of mass hysteria? You said you didn't see any bodies or anything when you were out there."
"No."
"And obviously neither of us is sick, so the whole airborne thing can't be as bad as they're making it out to be. And what the hell do they mean, women may change? Change into what? It all sounds fishy."
"Don't swear," my mother said, stirring her Sanka.
"Well, it makes me nuts."
"I know. I feel there's something we should be doing, but I can't imagine what."
"We can't sit here forever, that's for sure."
"Where can we go? I don't want somebody taking pot-shots at us."
"I know," I said. "But we're going to have to let somebody know we're here. We don't even have a phone. What about that old guy, Cowper, or even those guys over at Stoner Central? As long as we don't sneak up on them, I think they'd at least talk to us. We could take them a couple of MREs."
"We might need those. And if they were home, don't you think we'd have seen them by now? We haven't seen a soul in weeks. And by the way, Lulu, he's not some 'old guy,' he's your father."
"Whatever, but it's worth a try. I've seen his car there. Besides, even if nobody's home, they might at least have some food or something."
"You mean break in? Good heavens no!" My mother-paragon of virtue.
"Oh please."
"And be caught looting? Uh-uh, thanks but no thanks."
"Well, can we at least see if they're home?"
"I don't like the idea. What if some of that Agent X is floating around? I think we should stay put, like the radio says."
"Mum, if Agent X is as bad as they say, we'd have it by now. That is, if there was anyone to catch it from. I bet this whole area's deserted-all you have to do is look out the window." I flipped up the curtain. The view was like an overexposed photo of bleak suburbia. "We're like people in the Middle Ages who went to the countryside to escape the Black Death. Maybe we lucked out, but we can't just sit here forever. There may be help out there." I wasn't sure if I believed that myself.
But my mother thought about it, bit her lip, and nodded.
Bringing her chrome handcuffs and diecast toy Luger made Mum feel less vulnerable, so I didn't say anything. We drove to the cabin of my "father" first, a private little place tucked in its own cul-de-sac. He had a reinforced steel mailbox to ward off bat-wielding joyriders, and it was made quaint with an old lobster trap, buoys, and a jigsawed wooden sign that read, COWPER'S REST.
The cottage looked all shut up, but his big utility vehicle was parked in the driveway. I wondered if it might be possible to siphon gas out of it.
"Let's just sit in the car for a few minutes," I said. "Give him a chance to look us over."
"Okay," Mum said, turning off the motor.
We sat watching the house for any sign of activity, but no one peeked back at us through the blinds.
After a few minutes, my mother said, "I don't think there's anybody there."
"I know."
"I feel funny lurking out here."
"Well, let's go knock."
"You think so?"
"Sure, why not?" As we got out, I added, "But I think you should leave the gun in the car."
"I'll put it in my purse."
We cautiously climbed the porch and rang the bell, listening to the faint chimes within.
Apocalypse blues x-1 Page 1
