Growing up in Maine, she had often hunted ducks with her father. She wished she had that double barrel over and under shotgun. It would have allowed them to stay in their home. That gun was no doubt still in a gun cabinet in Maine, though without postal service or airplanes, that gun cabinet may as well sit on the surface of Mars.
Jack wanted to go home, if only for a few minutes. She hesitated at the road, checking left and right, not for cars, but for observers. Seeing none, she dashed across Misericordia Drive and up her driveway, running as fast as she could to the front door.
As soon as she unlocked the door and burst inside, she felt foolish. She was a superstitious little girl sure that mommy would catch her crossing the dangerous street on her own. Or maybe that cretin Bently had the power to appear from nowhere and hurt her.
The door had a solid deadbolt but, as Oliver pointed out when they moved to his house, the old door was too light and thin to withstand anyone really determined to enter. If Trent had been serious about busting down the door, he could have.
“Locks are for friends,” Oliver had said, “and doors and frames like that are to keep out ten-year-olds.” Now she wished that in all his supply-gathering, she had asked Oliver to return with a heavy metal door and something to reinforce the frame. A bazooka would be nice, too. She’d sleep better with a bazooka under her bed.
As Jack slipped inside, the smell of her home comforted her. The air was a bit stale, but every family home has its unique aroma and only now did she realize how much she’d missed theirs. It was as if she had been away a long time though it had only been a few days.
Everything was as they’d left it. Family pictures still hung on the walls. A laundry basket of unneeded things still lay on its side where she had knocked it over in her rush to pack. The beds were made, hospital corners.
It was the kitchen that was a wreck. Cupboards stood empty, their doors yawning open. They had been in such a rush to flee that dirty little man’s threats, that awful runt of a man — “I know where you live! I know where you live!” — they’d grabbed it all in a near panic as Theo fell ill.
She kicked the empty recycling bin under the kitchen table. “Terrified like rabbits,” Jack said aloud, disgusted.
Jack grabbed the long cloth bag from its hook. It held all their plastic grocery bags. She would take them all with her. Plastic bags had all kinds of uses. She assumed she would carry things in them, of course, but she might need them for other things: Keeping feet dry by putting them over socks or shoes. Plastic bags could contain human waste in a pinch. When it got cold, maybe she’d have to stuff the bags between layers of clothes and the plastic would serve as insulation to keep her family warm.
She rummaged through a cabinet. There was little detritus to rummage through: an egg separator, a potato masher, some corn cob holders and picks to dig out lobster meat from claws. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate lobster. Growing up in Maine, it had been a holiday staple. Then she moved west and learned from one of Jaimie’s books that lobsters were in the lice family. She hadn’t craved lobster since.
In another cabinet, she found the old dishes from her college days. They did not use them now, but Jack had kept them for Anna’s college years. She thought of those cheap plates and chipped bowls as Anna’s “first apartment dishes.” Jack let out a sniffle, thinking of what Anna would now miss. How long would her daughter have to wait before there was such a thing as a university again?
Jack looked through another drawer: Still no bendy straws. She let out a savage curse that shimmered an echo off the walls. Wiping a tear away, she felt like she was running scared, chased by something big, but not really seeing it as she raced away for her life.
Sutr was too big to see all at once. It was as if hurricanes had hit everywhere at once and she couldn’t pull back far enough from the world to take in all the devastation.
What was the government doing? Was a vaccine or a cure even close, or was Sutr going to be a virus that hung in the world, always there and waiting for its next opportunity to strike?
Those questions had no answers she could provide, so her mind turned to the little man who had threatened her family. Bently had run from an old man who’d drawn his blood with a bag of groceries. She’d moved her family into that same old man’s house, throwing in with a stranger, and shared her family’s food. She’d thanked Douglas Oliver for the privilege. She’d listened to the old man’s lectures on survival strategies and tolerated his rants that they were eating too many of their rations too fast.
Instead of threatening Bently, perhaps they could have made him an ally. She suddenly felt that, as a concession to emergency, she had given up too much far too easily. The man had been hungry and frightened and someone had to break the cycle of fear and the problem of me-first. If survivors worked together, everyone had a better chance to live.
She put a hand to her head. Her palm came away slick, but she did not feel unwell. She decided the sweat was a combination of worrying and exertion.
“Careful, Jacky,” she told herself. “Don’t talk yourself into getting sick.” People could make themselves sick by thinking too hard about being sick. It was the nocebo effect, the opposite of the powerful and helpful placebo.
She took deep breaths and looked around her kitchen, taking the search slower so she could be more methodical. Still no bendy straws. Theo wasn’t drinking enough. He’d told her he felt better, but she wasn’t sure she should believe him. Jack wondered if her husband was drinking less because of the virus, or was it because he thought he’d be dead soon, anyway?
She glanced up at the late afternoon sky. To the east, the sky glowed orange, but what she saw much closer made her jaw drop and her pulse race.
Birds, columns of them, filled the sky in circling hordes. Many looked like vultures. Black turkey vultures, maybe.
The fires must have blown past the city’s edges. Wildlife would be driven before the walls of flames, but scores of birds rose from the wooded land and come to the city to search for the dead under ominous, widening gyres.
The city had emptied of the living. Flights of carrion eaters were coming to claim their prize.
Despite herself, she pictured vultures clawing at her family’s faces and eyes. That was the moment Jack was sure they really would leave. To live, they would become strangers in a terrible land that had once been so familiar.
That was the real horror of this plague: the everyday and familiar turned to blood, rot and ruin. In this new world, innocence was a sound and an undecipherable code. It had become an alien word without meaning on Earth.
This wasn’t her home anymore. This was an open grave. Waiting.
But The Zombie Queen claims her prize.
Gunfire rattled and boomed across the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The siege was well under way. Superior firepower was no match for masses of human wolves with no thought for their safety. For every one-hundred killed, ten got through the line of military and police. The savagery was primeval. The ghouls’ hunger knew no bounds.
Shiva watched, smirking from her high window on Birdcage Walk. The gathering inhuman maelstrom had no strategy, only hunger. The infected did not corral the uninfected. They simply overwhelmed their terrified prey with ferocity and greater numbers from all directions.
“A conversation, Agent Perdue, is where you speak and I speak. This is not a conversation. This is an ultimatum.”
The man on the phone began to object.
“Do you want me to hang up or do you want to figure out where I’m calling from?” she asked.
Her question was met with stunned silence.
“Good, now be quiet and I’ll tell you a story while you figure out where I am. Just let me know when the sniper is in place to kill me. Understood?”
“Very well,” the perplexed Interpol agent replied.
“Do you know what a rat king is? Oh, excuse me. I told you to shut up. Never mind. I’ll tell you.” She to
ok another sip of wine. She’d switched to red and she was feeling relaxed despite the baby’s incessant kicking.
“A rat king,” she explained, “is a ball of rats held together by their twisted tails. The nest intertwines in an obscene knot, as if the rat colony becomes one disgusting organism. They can’t get away from each other. It’s a curious fluke of nature. It’s not seen often, but a ball of rats can be thirty or more. Some say they’ve seen a mass of the vermin with as many as 100. Imagine that in your bedroom, broiling and fighting and feeding on your bare feet, Agent Perdue.”
She heard him swallow hard.
“They end up feeding on each other. They strip their brothers and sisters clean to the bone. Imagine your brothers and sisters, neighbors and sons and daughters, all in a tangle, ripping flesh from bone and sucking the juice from each other’s eyeballs to live. Well, look outside at those poor civilian plague victims. I don’t suppose you have to use your imagination at all.”
“I hope there is a point to this story.”
“Is the sniper really in place? Were you surprised how close I was to your command center? Did your superiors argue with the Queen and beg her to leave for the relative safety of Balmoral? Good of her to think staying was a noble statement to the doomed populace. Stiff upper lip and all that. Tonight she can get a real taste of the commoner’s life.”
“We know where you are. The snipers are ready.”
“Doubtful,” she said, though she stepped away from the window. “That would be awfully quick of you and I daresay you would have shot me already. Or are your personnel far too busy, shooting into the crowd, killing their daughters and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and mothers? Ripping flesh from bone, as it were?”
“You’re mad.”
“I’m angry,” she replied. “You shouldn’t tell the crazy lady she’s crazy, even if it’s true. I bet that’s not in your hostage negotiation handbook.”
“You have a hostage?” Perdue asked.
“You might say you are the hostage, silly man. You just don’t see it yet. In a way, I’m the hostage since you have to save me at all costs. And I’m not really mad, by the way. Let’s be clear. I am very focused. A thousand years from now, the historians will say I saved the human race. And believe it or not, that will be true. Of course, history is written by the victors.”
He cursed. “If you’re going to talk my ear off, I may as well have you shot and go join the fight outside. Say something that makes sense or I’ll know you’re stalling.”
“Your machine guns are so loud and scary, but those barrels must get awfully hot. How much more ammunition could you possibly have on hand? And Sutr-X must have softened you up and depleted your forces devilishly, of course.”
“The sniper is in place, Miss Keres. And with our technology, it doesn’t matter if you step away from the window. He sees you just fine.”
“Oh, lovely.” She raised a glass and toasted her would-be assassin. “Thermal imaging scope or do you have something even newer and fancier? Were you really planning on a sniper or are you calling in a helicopter gunship to wipe out everyone, from me to the Queen’s front door?”
“Miss Keres,” Perdue said, “I am giving you one chance to surrender.”
“Counteroffer. I’ll give you one chance at a small chance to save what’s left of the world.”
There was a pause and she sensed the Interpol agent muted the phone to speak with someone standing beside him. When he came back on the line, his breathing was shallow.
“Tell me, Agent Perdue. Do you want to be the one who takes responsibility for say, destroying the Internet or burning down the library at Alexandria or killing the one person who holds the key to the survival of the human race? If you saw Jonas Salk walking down the street with the polio vaccine still an idea in his head, you wouldn’t kill him would you? You’d take a bullet for him, the needs of the many and all that. You’d do anything you could, wouldn’t you? Edward Jenner discovered the key to ending smallpox. You’d sacrifice yourself and a few others just for the hope of winning the long game, right?”
“What are you talking about, woman? Speak plain.”
“Try to follow me here. This is very important. The way to deal with a rat king is to poison it. I have poisoned the rat king.”
She moved back to the window and sipped her red wine. “Hello, Mr. Sniper! Please stand by a moment more.”
Below her, the gathering darkness transformed the mass of bodies into a silhouetted orgy, a blood sacrifice to Shiva’s ambitions. Only muzzle flashes illuminated the horror in strobes of human debasement: a ghoul tore at the throat of a policeman in riot gear here. Small children gnawed at the calves of a palace guardsman there. Another guard was on the ground, screaming for help under a riot shield. Seven women pinned him fast and crawled over each other to claw at his face and rip and chew his bare feet.
“I have poisoned your rat king, but there is an antidote.”
“There’s an antidote to the Sutr-X virus?”
“Oh, no. That was a failure. Sutr-X was an unfortunate miscalculation. But there is an antidote for what you see in the street below.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“Because I’m alive. I injected the one vial of vaccine in Britain before I allowed a lab rat named Bogart to bite me.”
Perdue turned from the phone again, consulting someone.
Shiva took another sip and turned to her iPod. The screen lit her face as she selected the song she wanted to hear. “Agent Perdue? Are you still there? Don’t be rude.”
“I’m here.”
“The vaccine is coursing through my veins, fighting off the infection so I don’t turn into one of those zombies. Is that a cliche? Should I really call them that? Does that sound too silly?”
“What do you want?”
“An excellent question. I am the Zombie Queen. I demand tribute.”
“What do you want, Miss Keres?”
“Don’t storm the building or attempt any useless heroics. All the stairways are wired to explode. If you try it, your last best hope for humanity — that would be me — will perish with the knowledge that could save the future.”
“I see. And how do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You already know about Bogart and you can’t imagine I accomplished all this on my own. A helicopter is coming for me. It will come to the roof and I will go unharassed.”
Someone whispered something in Perdue’s ear that Shiva couldn’t quite catch, but his defeated tone reassured her she remained in control.
“Okay,” Perdue said.
“In the meantime, I have three more demands. No helicopter is to leave Buckingham Palace. She’s quite a fit old woman, I’m sure, but if you try to make her run for her life, I shall be quite…displeased.”
Perdue sighed.
“You are to tell her my name. Names matter. Tell her Shiva says hello and that there can only be one queen. Open your gates. Throw open your doors. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!”
Perdue gave a nervous laugh. “Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because you have to keep me alive to have any hope for the human race. Comply and there’s a future. Defy me and I set off the bombs. I’ll disappear in a flash of light, painless and smug. You’ll still die screaming, but all the progeny from here to the last of those things will become the once-humans. Monsters will roam the Earth. If I die, Hope dies.”
“You like the sound of your own voice too much.”
“Tell your sniper the bombs will go off if I so much as trip and fall down.”
“I think you’re bluffing,” the Interpol agent replied.
“I think you’re very brave, Mr. Perdue. But I don’t think you’re so brave that you will be reckless. You believe you are a noble man and your cause is just. That’s why you won’t take the risk that I’m a liar. All of humanity is too much for a good man to gamble. If it makes y
ou feel better, the zombies are winning. Open your gates and you welcome the inevitable and maybe you’ll even save the future you imagined for the human race. Be a coward and all is lost and you’ll die anyway.”
She hung up, plugged her earbuds in her ears and touched the screen. Her selection came on: We Want Your Soul by Adam Freeland.
From ninety yards away, Staff Sergeant Tom Clayworth lay on his belly on a roof. He watched the pregnant woman through his rifle scope. Through his lens, she appeared in bright yellow and he could make out the cell phone and the wire to the iPod. Either one could harbor a gyroscope trigger to the bomb she claimed to have.
He keyed his radio mic. “I still have eyes on, sir. Permission to engage.”
A long pause. “She told me names matter. My name…” The agent’s voice shook. “My name means ‘lost’. Perhaps everything really is pre-ordained.”
“Sir? The target?”
“Negative on the target. Move to concentrate your fire on the riot, Staff Sergeant.”
“But, sir. I have a clean shot.”
“We’re about to open the front doors, Clayworth. Buy us a few minutes if you can, please.”
“Repeat, sir?” Clayworth put the ball of his index finger on the trigger, lining up a head shot.
“We’re letting those things in, Staff Sergeant. Do not engage the target.”
Clayworth hesitated a second more before following the order. He wondered how long he could stay on the roof before those rabid animals found their way up? He reached into his belt and put one round in his shirt pocket, sure to save one bullet for himself.
“But, sir…the Queen.”
“I’ll make sure she won’t suffer,” Perdue said. “God save our tomorrows because the Devil owns us tonight.”
Clayworth took one last glance at the target through his scope.
The Queen of the Zombies danced.
Season 1, Episode 4
You have forgotten you are meat.
You will be reminded.
*
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 22
