Navigating to her contacts and touching a name, she placed a call from the passenger seat of the truck in which she patrolled with Agent Cora Reynolds.
“Hi boss,” Steve Bradford said, answering his phone.
“Are you at Jeff Eckman’s home?” Lilly asked.
“I am,” Steve said. “There’s no sign that he’s been here in the past few hours.”
“I didn’t think you would find him there. But possibly the viral instinct to maintain normalcy will kick in, and he’ll go where he always goes. What does it look like there?” Lilly asked.
“Pretty standard modular residence,” Steve replied. “Small. Sparse. He lives alone and doesn’t seem to care about decor. Smart lighting, smart AC—smart everything. It’s fitting for someone who works in the tech field.”
“Stay there and wait,” Lilly ordered. “Turn off the lights and stay out of view. It’s unlikely that he’ll wander into your sights, but we need to cover all possible contingencies. I’ll send reinforcements to wait there with you, as many I can’t spare from the active search.”
“‘One is as ten thousand to me, if he be the best,’” Steve quoted.
Lilly ended the call and looked at Cora, behind the wheel. “Your family lives near here,” she observed.
Cora nodded. “They’re safe,” she said. They rolled down the street slowly, Lilly going back to directing the searchlight mounted on the door outside her window. “I called them right away and told them to lock the doors and windows, and not go outside for anything. Not even to walk the dog around the yard.”
Lilly smiled. “They’ll be fine,” she said.
“I know,” Cora said. “Thanks, boss. But let’s find this thing quickly and not play the odds.”
They drove along in silence, eyes peeled for any hint of movement in the darkness between buildings on one side of the road, or in the brambly fields on the opposite side.
Jeffrey Eckman
Technology Park, New Sacramento
December 25th, 2069
Shippy crept along through the darkness, worried and sick to his stomach. His soul shivered in fear like a thin dog in the cold, raging in vain at the terrible thing called life. There must be a corner somewhere where you could creep, curl up soft and be warm—but he had never found it. The big boys at school always stole his lunch and rubbed his nose in the dirt, and when he grew up it was just the same. There was something under his face—something that said, “Come bully me. I won’t bite.” He couldn’t see it himself, but it must be there. He was always going places and thinking, “This time, they won’t find out.” But they always did find out, after a while. They always saw that he was weak.
In his mind he had built up a super-Shippy, who ordered people around, loved glittering girls, threw out his chest and died for a bloody flag, and then revived to be thanked by gilt generals. A schoolboy Shippy, bullying the other boys and eating their lunches. It was his totem. He envisioned that Shippy now—reckless, powerful; unchained from the weakness that had always haunted him like a specter and looked back from every mirror and every window he passed. The vision consumed him and he raised his head, walking proudly down the dark alleyway towards home.
He remembered stabbing someone. There was blood all over his hands. His old weakness told him from somewhere in the back of his mind that he should run away. But something new inside him, something strong and unflinching, was telling him to act normal, to do what he always did. Not to let anyone know he had changed. That he had become like iron. Hide it. Hide it. They’ll never expect it. They bullied you for so long. It’s all different now, but their surprise will be half the fun. He took the steps towards his front door two at a time, bounding up them like a dancer. He opened the door to his home—and a figure slipped around the corner and bashed him in the head with the butt of a rifle.
He fell backwards, and the old Shippy would have curled up and waited until his bully got tired of kicking. But not anymore. He barely felt the pain of the blow, and reveled in his lack of timidness. He sprang up from the ground instantly and threw one hand at the figure’s neck, gripping her throat below her gas-mask, feeling the soft flesh cave in under his fingertips. The figure thrashed and tried to aim her rifle, but Shippy grabbed the barrel with his other hand and ripped it from her grasp, hurling it across the room to clatter on the floor. He was so strong. He had never been so strong. He heard her screaming behind her gas-mask. It was muffled and wheezy.
A voice in the dark said, “Lights on, full,” and emerged quickly out of the blazing white that dazzled Shippy and made him step back. The man who had spoken placed the barrel of a rifle against Shippy’s forehead. Shippy was wiling then to be friends and call it all a joke. But the man fired once, and it was over.
Steve Bradford
Residential District, Old Sacramento.
December 26th, 2069
Steve had dispatched the Sleeper quickly and easily as it came into the modular home, avoiding the need for the other three agents inside the room to engage. The agent who had been nearest the door suffered minor injuries and was quarantined for seven days, in case of exposure to infected blood. But she had been well protected by her BPH uniform and additional biohazard gear. Steve was sure she would be fine and released after the week was up. They had bagged the body rapidly and loaded in into a waiting Bureau truck. It was incinerated within the hour. The public vetting had been carried out on Christmas day and took five hours. Jeff Eckman had apparently not led very social life, because no one else in the area had been exposed to the virus.
And now it was time for Steve to do a very different kind of duty. One not in his official capacity to perform.
“Are you ready?” Abbie asked, standing beside him on the doorstep of a small, yellow house.
“Born ready,” Steve said. But he felt far more somber than he let on. He reached out and knocked smartly on the white painted door. It was quite a while before they heard any sound inside, a shuffling of feet and fiddling with the knob. A woman opened the door—her face a Greek tragedy mask. She was pale and drawn, her eyes puffy and red from weeping. Steve took a deep breath.
“Good morning, Mrs. Cunningham,” he said. “My name is Steve Bradford. I’m with the Sacramento Bureau of Public Health.” He saw a look of terror come into the grieving woman’s eyes, as if he had come to drop more horrible news on her.
“And this is Abigail Bonaventura,” Steve went on, hurrying to state their business and set the woman at ease. “She isn’t with the Bureau. We’re not here on official business.” Someone else walked up to the doorway beside the woman—a family member or friend, who had come to support her during her grieving.
“What are you here for?” the second woman asked. She was on edge. They were both bracing for whatever was coming. Steve held forward a dark mahogany box.
“These are your husband’s ashes, ma’am,” he said. “I just wanted to return them to you.” Mrs. Cunningham’s eyes widened, and she reached for the box with trembling hands…
“Why did you do it?” Abbie asked, as the two of them walked down the sidewalk away from the house, several minutes later. They had left Mrs. Cunningham in the arms of the other woman, sobbing in a mix of sadness and relief. Relief to at least have some sense of closure in regaining her lost husband’s remains for proper burial; to not lose him suddenly and without all trace, like he’d slipped away into the ether.
Alan Cunningham’s remains were a biohazard. They could kill his wife. So Steve hadn’t given them to her. The ashes in the box were wood ash. Steve and Abbie had spent Christmas night sitting beside a small bonfire in his yard, burning an old wooden chair and several tree branches, drinking, talking quietly.
“Why?” Steve echoed, chewing on the question. “Because that woman deserves to stay human. When things like this happen, it can turn us hollow. It’s our rituals that make us human again. Now she can bury her dead.”
Abbie stared at Steve.
“I s
olved the riddle,” she said.
“What riddle?” Steve asked.
“How you can be such a cynical asshole, and so amazingly kind at the same time,” Abbie explained. Steve laughed out loud. He hadn’t know what she was about to say, but he certainly hadn’t expected that.
“You don’t front,” Abbie went on. “You’re cynical about the world, and you don’t try to cover that up, flashing disingenuous smiles to everybody. But you’re fiercely committed to the people you care about. You’d do anything for them. You’re cynical, but you’re whole-heartedly kind when you decide to be. That’s the answer.”
She stopped walking and hugged Steve. “Let’s go drink,” she said, stepping back and looking him in the face.
“Yes,” Steve answered. “That.”
“RESURRECTION CITY, PART I”
Christopher Troy Myers
January 21st, 2070
New Sacramento, R&D Quad, Health & Wellness Building
“My new partner reminds me of my mother. I killed my mother.
“Goddamn, that sounded terrible. Hey, don’t get me wrong. You know the story. I didn’t want to do it. I had to. You know how it is.
“Sometimes I think I killed my little niece and nephew, too, on the darker nights.
“I don’t drink anymore. Haven’t touched a bottle in thirty years. Maybe that’s the problem, or part of it. I’ve been having the dreams again, lately. Always the same idea and the same old house, though sometimes the wallpaper is a different color, or the couch is on the other side of the room. The dreams make me relive it, over and over. Decades of burying it, and it’s bubbling up to the surface now. Maybe I’m just an old man. Maybe what I’m living through now is what Robert Frost meant by, ‘The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.’”
Troy sat on the Spartan, gray felt chair in Dr. Jones’ neat, white office. After letting his eyes wander over the various books, Troy took a sip of water from the tall, clear glass set on the coffee table that separated doctor from patient.
Dr. Jones looked up from her pad at him. She smiled softly, reassuring him that she was patiently waiting for him to continue.
Troy switched gears, then. He had to lay the groundwork before getting to the grit.
“My mom was a nice lady, from what I remember. Never drank, never spoke in anger. Ass in seat every Sunday in the pews. We were — she was Southern Baptist. Used to say ‘The Lord provides.’ Whether she was consoling Auntie J. when her husband died, or whupping my ass, that was her favorite thing to say.
“Well, the Lord provided her with the flu. And, this being around 2027, 2028, in Georgia, we slipped through the cracks of the national health care service. We had a house, so we were ‘too rich’ to be broke, but too broke to buy things like socks and heat. Sometimes. Not all the time. Anyway, we were way too proud to ask anyone for anything. Even though it got awful cold in that rickety house of ours. I think the walls must’ve been duct-taped together. So, what with my mom down with the flu and all, I thought: heat and socks. Need to keep her neck warm and her feet warm. Didn’t need any doctor to tell little ten-year-old me that much.
“I stole a lot of socks from the store. I must have looked like one fat, lumpy kid, huffing it out of that Walmart.
“When mom didn’t get better, I finally started asking for help. I asked everybody. Friends at school. Teachers. The principle, even though I didn’t trust that bitch. That was a long time ago, though. I barely even remember any of it. Mark — that’s my older brother — was off at College out of state. Hadn’t seen him in a couple years. My dad died when I was a kid. Mom didn’t ever say how.
“Nah, I can’t even remember most of the details. What I do remember is that no one helped my ass out. I also remember that my mom was dying. When the flu drug out for a month, two months, what was I supposed to do? I was just a kid. Around that time, Cartoon Network got shitty before disappearing altogether. The only thing on TV was news.
“News about people dying of the flu.
“Then I got real scared, so scared I could feel it from my throat to my tiny, ten-year-old nuts. Not too long after, maybe even the same day, the blonde on TV — I remember it clearly being a blonde white lady, but who knows?, could be wrong — she was saying to stay inside. There was just a hell of a lot of sirens out. Blue and red against the ceiling of my bedroom. I had a Phantom Menace poster on my ceiling.”
“Phantom Menace?” Dr. Jones asked.
“Right.” A faint grin slipped over Troy’s features. “I keep forgetting I’m old enough to be your dad. Man, the world lost a lot, didn’t it? No more Star Wars. No more simple stories about good and evil, where good always wins. I liked that shit as a kid.”
“Star Wars? I think I read about that once. Or another patient mentioned it in passing.” Dr. Jones rubbed her chin. “A film series?”
“Yeah, Doc. They were movies. Maybe they were shit, but nostalgia paints everything rosy, doesn’t it?”
Dr. Jones nodded. Her voice soft as a cat snoring, she said, “You said you were having nightmares.”
“I’m getting to that. In the dream, it’s always red and blue lights, like I’m at some kinda of fucked up rave. But — and here’s the kicker — it ain’t my mom whose head I’m bashing in with a ten dollar hammer. It’s my partner’s.”
Dr. Jones flipped a few pages back on her yellow papered notepad. “Corporal Meadowlark.”
“That’d be her, yeah.” Troy’s hands rest on his knees. He balled them into fists. “Look, I’m not the violent type.”
Dr. Jones held up her hand. “Please, Troy. There’s no need for rationales, here. I’ve told you before that you should think of my office as a safe space.”
He snickered, rubbing his eyes. “Ain’t no such thing.”
She smiled kindly. “Pardon the expression. What I mean is, we’ve all had to do things we aren’t proud of. Especially those of — forgive me for saying so — your generation.”
“Thanks for making me feel old twice in as many minutes, Doc. I guess I am turning fifty-three next month. Damn.”
“Well, we can’t have you retiring on us just yet,” Dr. Jones told him over her tortoise-shell glasses. “Back to the dream, and the memory that you believe it was inspired by.”
I took a minute to collect my thoughts. “Yeah. Okay, yeah. So, there was the flashing lights, red and blue. I must’ve fallen asleep sometime before three in the morning. I know because I set an alarm for then to check up on mom.”
“It wasn’t two o’clock, or four? Three, exactly?”
“I’m sure. Or, maybe it just got stuck in my head that way. Okay, point taken, Doc. Anyway, it was late.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to annoy you. Just trying to gauge how much you remember exactly, or think you do.”
“I know. For the records. This is all being recorded. I know the drill.” Troy crossed his arms and then his legs. He uncrossed them. “So. Yeah, right. Checking in on my mom. Bringing her tea, or juice, or something. The room was too quiet, was the first thing I noticed. She should’ve been making noises. She hadn’t been breathing well for weeks. Rattling in the throat.”
“Then what happened?”
“Got real quiet. It’s hard to describe. Can’t really get just how fucking scary it is to suddenly hear almost nothing at all.”
“Was your mother dead by this point? Was this when she,” Dr. Jones tapped the head of her pen against her pad, “came back?”
“Yeah.” Troy’s head sagged, his chin brushing his chest. “She fell out of bed, suddenly. I thought she’d got better, stupid little kid that I was. But I knew within seconds that there wasn’t nothing left of my mom in that thing.” He gulped down the remainder of the water in the glass. “It came after me, not looking at me, but through me. You know? And it wasn’t making any sound. In the movies and TV shows, they were always gasping and wheezing. But what’s dead and don’t breathe ain’t gotta — ain’t even able to make a sound.” He closed his eyes.
“She was so strong for someone who’d been in bed for months. I hid in the closet, she ripped open the door. I locked her in the bathroom, she practically punched through the wall to get at me. And she didn’t care how bloodied she got chasing me. She was unstoppable. The only thing that saved me was that I was a bit of a runt for my age. Else she’d probably’ve caught me and snapped my neck.” His shrugged then and his tone was blasé. “All that happened in about a minute or two. Then, when she followed me into the kitchen, I killed her. Not a peep from her, even then.”
“You killed her with the hammer?”
“Cracked her head like a chestnut. But I was just a kid. Took more than a couple hits.”
“How did you know to go for the head?”
“I didn’t. She — I mean it — slipped on the floor tiles. Her head was within reach. I figured it was it or me, so I did what I had to do.” Troy let slip a croaking laugh. “I was lucky, really. All those ‘gangstas’ you heard about in the next few weeks, riding around in their cars, doing drive-bys. They were too dumb to get that you couldn’t kill a Drunk unless you blew their heads off.” His voice trailed off.
Dr. Jones said, “How did that make you feel?”
He looked up at her. He blinked. “About those thugs? Couldn’t care less. I was looking out for Number One by then.”
“I meant your mother. How did you feel when you did it?”
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