Marjorie Bendham sat on the cold kitchen tile as the darkness gathered. She spooned the soup in cold. The chowder was a slimy gel that slid down her throat thickly. This time, she ate slowly.
When she was a little girl she’d sung in the church choir. Long after she lost interest in the church, she’d stayed so she could sing for an audience. A dimly remembered memory surfaced. She remembered the lavender and lace the old women around her wore, in much the same style as she wore now.
“In prayer,” her old preacher had said, “God doesn’t give you the right answer until you ask the right question.”
She prayed now, more to Al than to God. Looking for answers felt very much like groping for something lost in the dark. Then her mind closed around something cold and she thought, Aha. I’ve finally asked the right question.
Knees cracking and clinging to the kitchen counter, the old woman pulled herself up. Once she was on her feet and steady, Marjorie opened the fridge door again and stared at the relish bottle.
Something clicked over in her mind, like a lever switch closing, completing a circuit. Soon she’d be hungry enough to eat that relish right out of the bottle, smearing her lips green as she greedily sucked it down.
When she became that hungry, she would have to eat Al’s “hot dog-slop”. When that was gone and the hunger pangs returned, Marjorie Bendham resolved to slip a steak knife from her kitchen drawer and, while he slept, she imagined the great satisfaction she would feel when she slit Douglas Oliver’s throat wide. When his blood pumped out in spurting arcs, she would smile again. She might even grab a teacup and drink the old bastard’s blood for good measure. Plenty of protein in that.
The virus spreads, making evil minds
Jack knelt beside Theo. Her husband lay sweating on Douglas Oliver’s living room couch. She thought of a freshly caught fish on a dock, gasping and bewildered, its gills working uselessly. Theo sweated so much, he hadn’t urinated all day. The trip down the front walk had exhausted him.
“You’ve got to drink more. You aren’t getting enough fluids.”
Her husband gave a weak nod and pulled his head up to take a small swig from the bottle of water she offered.
The carpenter’s mask she wore annoyed her, steaming her glasses and making her face uncomfortably hot. When she went outside to take it off, the air felt so fresh and cool, it was a release from choking claustrophobia. Jack wanted desperately to stay out in the backyard until this was over, but when would this be over? They couldn’t hide forever behind masks.
With little else to do, Jack had made it her mission to find a bendy straw to make it easier for Theo to drink. Oliver didn’t have a bendy straw in the whole house. She had searched until she was certain.
She continued to search in unlikely places until she had to admit defeat. Besides, a woman looking for bendy straws in the back of a clothes closet wasn’t really searching for bendy straws anymore. She was looking for distraction.
“I’ve been a good sport, God. Now let me off this ride. I want to get off.”
Anna was locked in her room. When Jack checked in on her, she was either crying, sleeping or pretending to sleep. Her daughter needed time.
Jack remembered the desperate need that soaked through her skin and surrounded her heart when she was a teenage girl in the throes of love.
Theo hadn’t been her first love, but theirs was a love built on a powerful foundation. Theo had taken her in his arms at the end of their first date, maddeningly sure of himself. “Let’s have our first kiss, and savor it and take it really slow. This is dangerous business,” he’d said, his lips almost touching hers, but not quite.
“Why dangerous?”
“Because this will be the last, first kiss for both of us,” he said.
“You sound awfully sure you’re my prince and we’re going to have a happily ever after.”
“I don’t believe in that. There’s no happily ever after in the end. This is our happily ever after right now.”
“You better shut up and give me my last, first kiss before you talk your way out of the deal.”
“These days, at the beginning, are the best.” And they shared the kiss that had delivered them here and now instead of making other choices that would have led them into a different mystery.
Jack pushed the memory aside. That seemed like eons ago, something that happened to someone else. That was long before she started coloring her hair black. That was before she started wondering how long she could keep that up before her face and gravity would expose the pretense of hair dye. She was forty-eight. The Sutr virus had broken up young lovers and made her feel old.
But at least she’d had her time. She had been to Paris, Mexico, Bermuda and had seen the country. She’d gotten married and had her children. She’d studied and had jobs and made it half-way through a normal life span. Or…maybe she had been middle-aged at twenty-four and hadn’t known it. If she had known she would die this year, would she have made different choices?
Of course, all that she had already accomplished in life wasn’t a salve at all. She thought it should be, but it wasn’t.
“Don’t confuse an ought with an is,” Theo would say.
Jack Spencer wanted more time. She needed Theo to live. Her husband had to live to help get the family back to safety in Maine. She needed him to live to see his children grow up. She needed his help to deal with Jaimie. If Theo died, she might just give up. If everything was reduced to surviving, there’d be no more room for living. Without Theo, she’d have to do it all herself and she knew she wasn’t ready to face that.
Thank God for Douglas Oliver to get her through, at least until Theo recovered, she thought.
Jack had seen plenty of disaster movies. Theo was a movie buff and had drawn her into his obsession. Those movies always hit the same highlights: Riots and looting and the solemn president’s address to his nation and the world. Mass destruction and lots of film of brave young pilots and rescuers and saviors taking off in jets and helicopters. None of the movies had anything to say about the crushing boredom of waiting for whatever came next.
In real life, she knew most of the action was taking place in living rooms that looked very much like every other beige suburban living room. People, each a potential victim, waited for whatever would come next, battling depression and eyeing the pills in the medicine cabinet.
In movies, you could be sure that things would work out fine for whomever the camera followed. The biggest movie star on the screen would always survive to somehow forge a new civilization out of the rubble. You could safely enjoy any disaster movie as long as you identified with the one star the camera loved the most.
Those movies always followed the people who were at the center of the action: Center for Disease Control bureaucrats arguing over strategic plans; executive orders from the president; gas-masked troops in the streets scaring the hell out of civilians; and, of course, the last honest man who knows the secrets of the cause of massive death and who to blame. Add one extremely unlikely love interest who worked her way through her biochemistry PhD by swimsuit modelling in her spare time and you had a summer hit.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were enough troops to give us some sense of order, that someone was in charge? She’d love to see soldiers sworn to protect her wandering around her neighborhood about now. Trucks full of food supplies and Army engineers swarming over the power grid to get it running again would be most welcome. However, when the disaster is everywhere, the help has nowhere to come from.
What would a movie of a real global disaster look like? A collage of her pacing and praying? Should she conform to the demands of a more dramatic script and pound on Anna’s door, giving her daughter an inspiring speech about how all we have is each other and if we’re going to survive…?
No.
Anna wasn’t sent over from Central Casting. If she tried to lecture her daughter about fleeting love and how Trent wasn’t really so important,
there was a chance Anna would run off after him. Young love is rigid steel and a girl with romantic ideas in her head might not stand the test of familial loyalty. Jack was frightened she’d lose her daughter. She knew someday it was inevitable, but today, she couldn’t do without her. Not now.
She didn’t want to risk talking to Anna yet and she didn’t want to put her mask back on to check on Theo. If Oliver was right, they’d all already been exposed and there was no point taking extraordinary measures to isolate themselves from her husband. Jack walked downstairs aimlessly.
Jaimie, her ghost son, sat on the back step, reading — no, analyzing — a dictionary. He clapped the book closed and immediately reached for his Latin dictionary, as if something in one reference book had piqued his curiosity and led him to the other.
Jack bent beside him, put a light hand on his shoulder. Jaimie ignored her. “What do you see in there that’s so interesting?”
No answer, of course.
“Or are you just hiding?” she wondered aloud.
His eyes slid sideways and he shifted his weight, shrugging slightly, turning away.
She watched his reaction. Had she hit the mark? If she someday happened across asking Jaimie the right question, would he suddenly turn to her and say, “Finally!”
If she caught her son at just the right moment, would a dammed up torrent come flooding out? She longed to swim in his words the way he swam through his dictionaries. Her son was as remote as the moon, only occasionally sending a brief, garbled telegraphic message back to Earth.
Theo seemed to have a better handle on Jaimie’s intent, somehow intuiting their son’s rare, cryptic utterances. To her, Jaimie’s occasional messages seemed to boil down to one thing: “Still here.”
Jaimie was her strongest reason for needing her husband to recover. He was his father’s son and, as far as Jack could tell, Jaimie merely regarded her as someone he lived with. Or maybe she was wallpaper or a potted plant to him.
Jack watched Jaimie read, wondering what intrigued him so. For a selective mute to be so fascinated with words was beyond the land of irony and deep into cruelty. On some level, she was pleased and impressed. At least he was a reader.
Jaimie’s teachers suspected he was some kind of savant, albeit not a sort they had ever encountered. She knew the official term used to be “idiot savant” and that annoyed her. She took little pleasure in the knowledge that Jaimie was somehow on the same mysterious spectrum as autistic math wizards or great pianists. Beyond those esoteric skills, they lived in their own world that only occasionally touched the world she knew.
Sometimes she wished Jaimie’s talent — “special interest” the doctors called it — was one of the more expressive sorts so she could at least hear him play a piece of music or do long division at tax time.
Once, she had asked him why he loved to study reference books. He had perked up unexpectedly, like a scuba diver popping out of a hot tub. Jaimie had opened a dictionary, flipped pages, heading toward the front of the book. He pointed out a word to her: Assiduously.
She sighed and walked away, crying silently. Was this the way it would always be? Long periods of silence interspersed with odd scraps of words, some brief moments of light in long darkness?
“Jaimie has conversations by approximation,” Theo told her.
Jack put her mask back on and headed to the living room. Her husband lay where she had left him, looking gray. She listened to his labored breathing. Would he turn blue next? Was this the worst of it? If you’re planning a remarkable recovery, Jack thought, now would be an excellent time to turn things around.
“Hey,” he said, eyes open. “Wouldn’t it be easier if it was just me who wore the mask instead of making everyone else wear one?”
“Sure,” she said, “but you’ll breathe easier this way.”
Could he even suck air through the paper of a mask? She guessed Theo would be thinking the same thing. The question hung unspoken between them. Married people, through long practice, had conversations by approximation, too, she supposed.
She sat on the floor against the couch, her back to her husband. “I’ve been talking to Oliver.”
“Yeah?”
“The last thing we want to do is leave. We’re better off just staying put. The wind has shifted away, at least for now, so the fire’s headed off to ruin a bunch of other people’s lives instead of ours.”
“So…yay.”
“Uh-huh.” Jack somehow found the energy to smile. “I know you’re worried about your dad — ”
“If Dad hasn’t got the flu, he’s in better shape than we are,” Theo said. His voice was weak but he was coughing less. Jack thought that must be a very good sign or a very dire one.
“But,” she continued, “if we do have to bug out—“
“Bug out?”
“That’s what Oliver calls it.”
“As opposed to simply leave?”
“Bugging out means we’re running out of here with our hair on fire,” she said. “Metaphorically.”
“I get the nuance now.”
“He keeps going through his stuff and our stuff and Mrs. Bendham’s stuff and trying to figure out what to take. I think he’s packed and repacked the van a few times now.”
“Tough job,” Theo said. “No matter how you pack, it’s never really enough. We need an 18-wheeler for the hardware supplies, a few 18-wheelers for the food, one just for movies — ”
“Several for books,” she said. “I know, I know. I turned the house upside down looking for a damn bendy straw for you. Who would have thought that was a survival tool?”
“I’m surviving,” he said.
“I just really wanted to make you more comfortable,” Jack said, her eyes welling.
“When there’s no medicine, you have to rely on time to heal you,” he said. “Have you given any thought to what things will be like after all this is over?”
Her lips became a thin line. “What else is there to think about? Once we’re through this, it will be the same, except with fewer people and we’ll have some long stories to bore our grandchildren with.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. He sat up a little and she moved to help him, pulling on one arm and moving his pillow farther down his back to prop him up. “I think we’re headed to the Dark Ages again, like after the Black Plague.”
“We keep better records now. We won’t lose so much knowledge. This is a blip. History keeps repeating itself and it’s awful, but it’s all a blip for the next generation.”
Theo shook his head. “Dunno. You could be right. There’s an argument that Hitler influenced his century more than any other person because all that evil spurred so much invention, leading to technological developments we’re still benefiting from.”
“Funny,” Jack said. “Douglas was quoting Kurt Vonnegut, saying that a lot of talent died in World War II and that was a loss of progress for generations. Maybe we would have had iPhones by 1970, instead.”
Theo shrugged. “When you talk about Kurt Vonnegut, it makes me think you’re trying to distract me from other things.”
She picked up the water bottle at her feet and offered it to him. He refused it and stared at his wife.
“Your dad’s place is still the best bet.”
“What about taking over a farm that’s closer?” he said.
“You just said yourself, Theo. If Papa Spence hasn’t got the flu, he’s in better shape than we are. What if this drags on into the fall or gets worse?”
“It can’t last that long. Things are messed up on the ground right now, but there are people somewhere who know what they’re doing. They are working to beat this thing. There’s some guy or some woman who’s bent on being the world’s savior. They’re falling asleep looking at test tubes in a centrifuge right now,” he said.
“I’m just saying, what if?”
“Then we’ll deal with it here,” he said. “The fire will stay away.
The whole damn city can’t burn down.”
“Fall through that bridge when we come to it?” she said. “You might be overestimating your sheer force of will, baby.”
“The last thing we want to do is leave. We need to just stay put and stay calm,” he said.
“I’m calm,” she said. “That’s why I can talk about this stuff.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” Theo said, “and I’m not calm. I’m scared. Almost scared to death. But I’m feeling a little better. You didn’t think I’d let a little thing like untimely death stop me, did you?”
“You remember our last first kiss?”
“On the front steps of your dorm. Of course.”
“Good. Get better quick. We have a lot to do and I need you to hold Jaimie’s hand all the way to Maine when the time comes.”
“I promise.”
Big Brother lies and denies
Jack slipped a fresh mask over her face. She wished she really thought the mask would make a difference. Hospital workers she’d seen on the television news took a variety of precautions, from hair nets and double masks to Hazmat suits and N95 respirators. On YouTube, she’d seen police officers wearing gas masks. Some people with new gas masks had suffocated because they didn’t know they had to take the plastic cap off the filter. Many nurses wore hospital masks with plastic shields that covered their eyes.
If those protective measures had worked correctly, she didn’t think she’d be scanning an empty street now. The home across the street from which her family had fled — her home — was a standing invitation.
“I know where you live! I know where you live!” that ragged little man had said. For the first time, she wondered if they had overreacted moving in with Douglas Oliver. Still, if Bently showed up, there were no police to haul him away.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 21
