This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3

by Robert Chazz Chute

  “What if they want to send a large boarding party?”

  Shiva could not conceal her irritation. “Deal with them as if you are in control and you will be! Tell them that if they want our trust and cooperation, they must demonstrate their trustworthiness and cooperation. For all we know, they’re pirates. Tell them that.”

  “What if they are pirates?”

  Shiva pulled her dress on, the fabric tight over her belly. “Lijon. We are making history, yes?”

  “Yes, Dear Sister.”

  “Who makes history, Lijon?”

  “The predators.”

  “And we’re making a better future, correct?”

  “Of course, Dear Sister!”

  “And who alone can do that?”

  “The righteous.”

  “So what do we have to fear from people whose only ideology is selfishness and fear?”

  * * *

  Rotor wash raked Shiva as she watched the Lynx helicopter land on the deck of the Gaian Commander. Four men wearing chemical masks and carrying rifles jumped from the helicopter and ran toward her. The masks were advanced, more like goldfish bowls than the cheap particle filtration and activated charcoal filters most military wore.

  She gestured for the men to follow her. Shiva did not speak until they were away from helicopter. When she could be heard, she turned to give them a broad smile. “Welcome aboard my refugee ship, gentlemen! We’re unarmed, so please shoulder your weapons! You’re among friends!”

  Behind the hardened plastic, the naval officer’s face was grim. He looked at her with piercing eyes. When he spoke, the hollow of his mask made his voice deep and authoritative. “We determine where we point our weapons, Miss — ”

  Shiva opened her big coat. “It’s Missus, and not only are there children aboard, I have a baby on board.”

  The man glanced down her body and gave a slight nod. “Congratulations, ma’am.”

  She caressed her swollen belly. “We’re going to have to be very careful of the children. They are our future. I know that’s a cliche, but in times like these…well. We’ll need every one of them, won’t we?”

  “Let’s get inside and out of the wind, ma’am!”

  Once the door clanged behind them, the men crowded around her. “I’m Lieutenant Wiggins, ma’am. Who are you?”

  Shiva stuck out her bare hand and he reluctantly shook it. If not for his gloves, he would have refused the gesture.

  Shiva beamed her smile wider. “I’m Sherry Goldwater.” She reached into a pocket and produced a company identification card. “With Goldwater Investment Group.”

  “And what do you do with the Goldwater Investment Group, exactly, ma’am?” Wiggins didn’t appear to warm to her charms.

  “Tinfoil hat division,” she said. “My formal title was Risk Assessment and Management Director. A lot of people didn’t take me seriously until the Sutr-X virus started killing everyone.”

  “That was lucky.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it! Most everyone on this ship would be dead if not for me. And if I weren’t Rube Goldwater’s daughter, I wouldn’t have been in a position to enact contingency plans and get this project on its feet.”

  “Assessing and managing risk, you mean?”

  “Gathering together the wherewithal for an ark, Lieutenant. This ship is full of families. They’ve been isolated. There’s not a single sick passenger.”

  Wiggins’ face was still stone. “What’s your destination?”

  “Bermuda, if it’s still a safe zone. We’ve prepared a place. Perhaps when you’re done your blockade, you’ll set sail for Hamilton and join us. Soon, I don’t think we’ll have much need of warships anymore.”

  Finally, the Lieutenant’s face softened. The trio of sailors behind him looked at each other and grinned.

  Hope, Shiva thought. That’s what keeps fools warm right up until they’re swallowed by an avalanche.

  “I have orders to inspect the ship, Mrs. Goldwater.”

  “That’s a delicate issue. Captain Tavish Price sends his regrets, but there’s a good reason I was sent to greet you alone. I’ve already had a touch of the flu and survived, you see. That’s why I’m your liaison. I’m immune to Sutr now and well past being contagious.”

  Wiggins looked to his men and removed his mask with obvious relief. Between their heavy body armor and the breathing apparatus, they were broiling. Sweat poured down their faces.

  “Touch nothing,” he ordered.

  “Lieutenant, would you mind looking at the hold through cameras? With that precaution, none of you gentlemen can infect our only hope for the future. And, of course, nothing can infect you or your men.”

  Wiggins told his men to stand easy and took Shiva by the arm farther down the corridor. “My orders aren’t about Sutr-X. This is about the new strain. They call it Sutr-Z.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. I know what you’re talking about. I saw it firsthand, in London.”

  “You were in London?”

  “Yes, before we evacuated to Dublin. I saw London fall. I saw such horrors, I thought I’d lose my head.”

  He sighed heavily. “Dublin’s gone under, too, I’m afraid. Overrun. It’s spreading through the country as fast as a madman can run.”

  The ship rocked hard. “Oh! Oh, dear!” She leaned against him. He caught her weight. She buried her head in his shoulder and wiped away an invisible tear.

  “All those poor people. We couldn’t save more than we did. I wish we could have. We couldn’t.”

  “I’m sure you did all you could, Mrs. Goldwater.”

  “For everyone’s safety…and yours…please, make do with looking through the cameras at the passengers. With this new virus mutation, you’ll obviously be able to tell instantly if there’s anyone infected down there. If there were, you’d see nothing but panic and screaming and death.” She hugged him tight, whispering in his ear. “You should have seen London. It was mad. Even the children came to feast.” He couldn’t see her smile.

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to fulfill my mission by looking through your cameras, Mrs. Goldwater.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. For everyone’s safety…thank you for your understanding. So much is at stake.” Shiva squeezed him tighter before letting go. Wiggins stiffened in surprise, but she allowed her lips to brush his as she pulled away.

  It would be enough. But even Shiva did not realize all that she had unleashed. Something new, a revenant of something very old, had begin its journey back to life.

  Revolution is temporary. Evolution is forever.

  The answer is under the stars and moon shadows casting

  Birds circled above in scattered clusters. On the road ahead, more carrion rotted. On the left, the cadavers of two men lay under a cloud of flies. Five birds worked at the bodies. Jack wanted to avert her eyes but found she couldn’t.

  One of the bodies lay atop the other. For a moment she thought it was a couple who had somehow died copulating. What am I seeing?

  No. The men didn’t die in a twist of fornication in the road. Somehow, they had killed each other. She imagined steak knifes amid the rotting flesh, steel sunk deep, glueing the bodies together until decay and merciless sharp beaks finally pulled mortal enemies apart.

  Jack shuddered. If people don’t begin to act better, will we be able to live with ourselves even if we survive? Had the world come to the brink of colonizing Mars and got smacked down for hubris? Did the future belong to birds, flies, insects and gluttonous bacteria?

  Jack stared straight ahead and, seeing an open stretch, sped up. Damn the gas, she thought, we’ve got to get farther away from the city.

  She stabbed a button on the radio and a chaotic jazz instrumental played. Irritated, Jack switched stations again. A heavy base beat pounded like a heart while a guy rapped happily about making millions.

  The music choices seemed like a subtle sign of a change in the course of the epidemic. In the early days, the radio stations played news repor
ts, somber classical and hymns. Religious programming broadcast to an ever-decreasing flock until it virtually disappeared from the airwaves.

  Now, survivors played what they liked, wearing out generator fuel on the music they preferred instead of the music they’d been told to play. The Man and Big Brother were dead.

  Jack switched to AM radio, but all they could find amid static was the same emergency broadcast message telling them to stay in their homes.

  “I wish we’d made more friends. Good friends,” Jack said, “or kept the friends we made when we were young. Everyone moved so far away from the one place they have to take you in. We left for college and adventure. We had to move to get decent jobs.”

  “I’ve already had more than enough adventure,” Mrs. Bendham spoke for the first time since they’d got on the highway. “People were always looking for adventure. I bet they’d love the quiet life and a boring, air-conditioned cubicle now.”

  * * *

  Jaimie glanced at his father. Theo’s skin still looked white, like he might fade away at any time, but he no longer coughed and sweated. Theo caught Jaimie looking at him and seemed to read his son’s mind. “I’m not feeling bad for an ancient librarian. Sutr almost got me, didn’t it? That race had a photo finish.”

  An hour into their drive, the road widened. A few wrecks dotted the ditch, but the road stood clear. However, dozens of shoes littered the road ahead.

  “What happened here?” Jack asked.

  “A riot.” Mrs. Bendham said. “When a lot of people run for their lives, that’s what happens. I remember the news coverage after the Rocket Richard riot. I don’t remember any details. I think it happened in Montreal after a hockey game. I can’t even remember if people rioted because they won or because they lost. Hundreds of shoes all over the street. It looked like this.”

  Fires smoldered ahead and the landscape flattened as the last glimpse of Kansas City dropped behind them. What few buildings there were had been eaten by fire. Parts of buildings still stood here and there like the broken ribs of ruined skeletons. A few blackened bodies dotted the rubble.

  To their surprise, they came upon a pasture where cows still grazed on the grass among the bodies.

  “I thought they killed all the cows,” Anna said.

  “Sutr-X came too quick,” Jack said. “The farmers came down with the flu before they could carry out their orders.”

  “The cows aren’t dangerous unless they’re infected and then only if someone’s stupid enough to eat them,” Mrs. Bendham said. “Maybe the people left or died because they knew no one from the government was going to come to scold them and give them a fine.”

  Farther on, more bodies lay along the road and many more birds pecked at them. Some lay in burnt piles. Others lay in neat lines.

  Off to the left, they saw a familiar sight. Mrs. Bendham spotted it first. “The meat wagon!”

  It was the red and yellow van with the bell hanging from the driver’s mirror. The truck’s body read: Burko’s Knife Sharpening and Small Repairs.

  Jack didn’t mean to slow down. She did it automatically, peering to get a better look. The driver had been an obnoxious little man. He was bald and, at a distance, that’s how Jack was sure it was him, dead at the wheel. As they drew closer, they saw that he was not simply bald. Something, or someone, had stripped part of the scalp away. A strip of white skull shone from his eyebrows up and all the way back.

  Beyond Burko’s van, a dozen flatbed trucks sank to the top of their wheel wells in mud. Around them, piles of blackened bodies still smoldered and stank. The pyres of Kansas City’s dead stretched out to the horizon.

  “You can only throw a body so high,” Theo said. “Then you have to start another pile. They must have been trying to conserve fuel or they would have done a better job of burning bodies.”

  Mrs. Bendham moaned. “Oh…Al. Poor Al.”

  Jack pressed the accelerator as the prevailing wind hit them with the stench of thousands of charred bodies. As one, without discussing it, they all pulled their shirts over their mouths and noses.

  “I didn’t know there were so many birds,” Anna said. “It’s scary how many birds there are. I never thought about it before.”

  “The pyres…well, that was necessary. Grisly, but necessary,” Jack said. “All those shoes…that bothers me more.”

  “What happened there, do you suppose?” Anna asked.

  “It wasn’t a hockey riot,” Jack said. She’d guessed the cause was marauders with guns, but she didn’t want to say so.

  “I saw the Road Warrior trilogy, Mom,” Anna said. “I can guess.”

  “Look over there, in the field to the right.” Mrs. Bendham gasped. Her hands went to her face.

  When people touch their faces, it’s a gesture to comfort themselves. Jaimie had read that and believed it. He touched his own face, mimicking the old woman. He felt no different, so he followed Mrs. Bendham’s gaze.

  Rows of bodies were lined up, all face down in the mud.

  Prone, Jaimie thought, is face down. Face up is supine. Many people are unclear on that.

  There were more bodies on the ground in short lines. It was as if they had been clutches of fellow travelers taken aside, arranged carefully and shot in the back of their heads.

  “That’s a very military thing to do. That’s what war looks like,” Mrs. Bendham said.

  “We aren’t in a war, Marjorie,” Jack said.

  “Aren’t we?”

  * * *

  Anna whispered a curse. She did not allow herself to cry aloud, but hot tears slipped down her cheeks. She stared at her feet rather than take in the scene of execution.

  “Too bad we can’t fly a plane. We’d be far and away.” Mrs. Bendham wiped tears from her cheeks.

  “Our neighbor, Mr. Sotherby, was a commercial pilot,” Anna said.

  “We could use him right now couldn’t we, dear?” Mrs. Bendham replied.

  “I hate flying, anyway,” Jack said. “The staff manage to be civil but never graduate to polite.”

  “Yeah, then there’s that whole airport security hassle. Who needs that?” Anna deadpanned.

  Jaimie leaned forward and pointed ahead and to the right at a wooded crossroads.

  Theo nudged his son in the ribs with an elbow. “What’s up, kid? Speak!”

  “Truck!” Jaimie yelled.

  Jack stood on the brake. A few seconds later would have been too late. The dump truck blew through the intersection without slowing so it was up to Jack to swerve and slide.

  The massive gray and black blur flew in front of them. Drag rocked the van sideways like a surprise crosswind about to capsize a sailboat. The big truck was another hundred feet away before they heard its driver angrily blast his air horn. Before it disappeared, Jack caught a glimpse of a pile of bodies in the truck bed.

  Jack’s hands fluttered on the wheel. The shock of the near miss shook through her.

  “I want to go home, Mom,” Anna said. She was hugging herself, eyes closed. “I know it’s not there anymore, but I want it. I want to be home.”

  “I know,” Jack said. She put a hand out to her daughter. Shock made their hands cold. She looked back at her son. “Thanks, Jaimie. Someone’s looking out for us, after all. Thank God.” she said.

  “Amen,” Mrs. Bendham whispered.

  “Seems like kind of a minor miracle, doesn’t it, though?” Theo said. “Not to sound ungrateful, but if you’re going to credit your invisible friend with saving us from a horrible death in twisted metal, great. But can’t He do something about the rest of this disaster, too?”

  Jack turned back to the road. Anna was crying again. Jack unbuckled her seatbelt to hold her daughter in her arms. “Sh. Sh. We are going home. Home to Papa Spence’s farm.”

  “Home is where it’s safe,” Anna said.

  “It will be safe,” Jack said.

  “We’re going to get away,” Theo insisted, his voice sud
denly hard. “We’re going to make it to the farm. With clear roads, it’s only a couple days away.”

  Jack pulled Anna to her, tighter than before. “We’ll be safe,” she said. But was she trying to convince her daughter or herself? Jack tasted salt as she lightly kissed her daughter’s cheek. She hadn’t kissed tears away since Anna was a little girl.

  “We’re going to get to Maine,” Jack said, trying this time to insert more calm resolve in her tone.

  Jack was a woman of faith. She had to believe somebody was in a lab at the bottom of a bunker working to find the cure. Flu pandemics come in waves. The apocalypse wasn’t a one-time thing. If it didn’t kill you in its first harvest, it could very well get you with the next deadly pass. If there were too few people left, civilization could never reboot.

  Hope, she told herself. That’s how God manifests in our lives, through the heroism and decency of people. By helping each other, we show there is a God.

  They came upon another scattering of bodies. Maybe it was the carrion eaters. Maybe it was grenades. Body parts lay here and there, like a puzzle with pieces missing.

  Something clicked in Jack’s head. She took a deep breath and focused on the road, knuckles white on the wheel. Until the intrepid movie hero showed up to get them to safety, screw it, so be it and amen. She’d do it all herself. God could tag along and watch her until He was ready to take up the slack and help out. Jack remembered an old prayer and chanted, “God help us. God be in us. God work through us.”

  Ne cede malis, Jaimie thought.

  Theo Spencer turned in his seat and regarded his son gravely. His father’s race with the Sutr virus had changed him in ways Jaimie could not yet comprehend. Theo leaned close and whispered in Jaimie’s ear, “I know you won’t tell your mother, so I’ll tell you, you’re right. Ne cede malis. Do not yield to misfortunes.”