“I’ll turn around. We’ll find another road as soon as I see a spot for a U-turn.” But there was no such spot and no time.
Ahead, a man in camouflage stood on an armored personnel carrier. He wore a gas mask. The large glass circles for eyes made him look like a bulky praying mantis. He pointed his machine gun at the line of cars.
Jack felt a long icicle of fear pierce her diaphragm. “Anna, switch places with Jaimie! Quickly!”
“Jaimie! Get beside your Mom,” Theo said.
Anna clambered into the back, pulled her mask over her face and rolled into a ball on the floor.
A short, stocky soldier in a gas mask, ramrod straight as if to make up for his lack of height, walked down the line of cars toward them. He peered into each car, the .45 revolver in his left hand held loosely at his side. He appeared not to engage the drivers in conversation. He gave each curt orders and moved on.
“Can’t we turn around and get out of here?” Mrs. Bendham said. They were blocked on all sides. The old woman’s plea was a helpless wish.
Jack clutched the wheel and checked the rear-view mirror. The SUV behind them was snug to her back bumper. “Look around, Marjorie. Besides, that soldier might shoot us for trying to avoid the roadblock.”
The soldier’s mask muffled his voice so he yelled, overcompensating. “As soon as the line moves, move with it. Keep your vehicle in line and do not get out of your vehicle until you’re told to do so! Do not stop or reverse the vehicle or you will be shot!”
A white van pulled in behind the SUV and the soldier moved on to deliver the same message.
On his way back, Jack rolled her window down slightly. “What’s going on?”
He craned, trying to peer through the family van’s tinted glass. “Up ahead, you’ll park your vehicle in the field to your left or right. One of the men will direct you.”
“What then?”
“Do I look like the information booth at the mall to you? All you need to know is the road ahead is closed.”
“What do you mean it’s closed?”
“Closed!”
He looked through the windshield at Jaimie. “Funny looking kid,” he said.
“What?” Jack yelled. “What did you say?”
“You heard me right the first time,” he replied. “Y’all be walking back the way you came real soon.”
“Let it go, Jack,” Theo said. “Jaimie? Do your thing. Sap him.”
Jaimie peered at the man. Sitting between the soldier and her son, Jack felt something pass over her, like someone was handling her heart with cold fingers. The soldier looked confused, stepped back and holstered his weapon. He looked around, as if unsure where he was.
The roar of a vehicle coming fast seemed to waken him from his confusion. He rushed back along the line. “Whoa! Whoa!” the soldier yelled. He drew his pistol and fired three shots in the air. The pickup’s brakes chomped and its tires squealed. Everyone braced for the impact, but what seemed inevitable did not come.
“Oh my God!” Mrs. Bendham squirmed in her seat. “I thought there’d be a chain reaction and I’d be hammered from behind!”
Jack turned in her seat to see the old woman. “The rest of us, too,” she said. Jack glanced down at her daughter. Anna’s eyes were filled with fear but she said nothing.
The soldier slapped the back of the van with a gloved hand. “The line’s moving. Keep your vehicle moving!”
They continued to edge forward. Empty cars filled the field to their right. Ahead, a heavy machine gun’s muzzle pointed at them from behind a barrier of sandbags.
A pile of bodies lay to the left of the gun emplacement. These were not laid out separately for counting as they’d seen before. The corpses were piled like a haystack of loose white limbs and bloody torsos, ready for burning. Or a warning to cooperate.
Jaimie watched his mother’s face as she surveyed the bodies. A new idea came to him. He thought he understood the look on his mother’s face. There was a Latin phrase for that look: Bella detesta matribus. Wars, the horror of mothers.
A new soldier appeared on the driver’s side, his gas mask pulled up on his forehead so his red, sunburnt face was exposed. Rivulets of sweat dripped from the young man’s chin. The rain had abated but there was no less humidity. He must have grown sick of the processed air’s heat inside his heavy rubberized mask.
“Park your van on the right. You can leave with what you can carry, subject to a search. Come back to the gun over there before you head back.”
Jack swallowed hard. They could find alternate transportation easily, but how much could they really carry to sustain them for the journey ahead? The van was packed with all Douglas Oliver could steal and salvage. To lose it all on their second day of travel was too much to bear.
“Turn right,” the man repeated. “Then come back here with your stuff for sorting. Over there. By the bodies. Be good and we won’t add you to the pile. Get it?”
Jack edged forward behind the BMW. The silver sedan wheeled right and then wove left. The driver stomped on the gas and ran into a soldier. The rifleman flipped over the BMW’s fender and landed on the pavement with a sickening smack.
Distracted, other soldiers moved forward only to be chased back as the BMW’s engine roared. The driver appeared to be set not on escape, but on attacking his would-be captors. Taken by surprise, they shot wildly as they ran backwards.
The short soldier in the gas mask appeared by Jack’s window and screamed for her to turn right. He then ignored her and ran forward to fire on the BMW.
Gunfire seemed to change the driver’s mind. He switched his tactics from attack to escape. He swerved around the gun emplacement to roar off, heading north.
Scared by the gunshots, Jack spun the wheel right, toward the edge of the field south of the roadblock.
“No!” Mrs. Bendham yelled.
“Don’t be good, Jaimie,” Theo said.
Jaimie reached out and jerked the steering wheel to turn the van into a sharp left. Jack glanced at her son, astonished.
The short soldier took aim at the BMW. His back was turned. He never saw the van coming as Jaimie slammed the grill into him. The man went under the van’s wheels. For the second time, the Spencer’s family van jounced over a man who called himself a soldier.
Jaimie let go of the wheel and Jack took control again, steering them quickly under the muzzle of the machine gun. The soldiers howled their outrage and screamed incomprehensibly from behind their masks as the van crunched over the limbs of the dead at the edge of the grisly pile.
Hesitation would get them killed. Jack wrenched the wheel and stomped on the gas. They screeched away, following the BMW’s lead north.
“Everybody down!” Jack gripped the wheel, glancing in her rearview mirror. Surprised soldiers scrambled behind them. Gunfire erupted and bullets whined. A spatter of bullets — small arms fire — smacked the road around them. From what Jack could take in at a glance, most of the soldiers were preoccupied with making sure no one else tried to escape.
Jack wove into the narrow gauntlet of abandoned cars. She slammed her foot into the accelerator harder as a gap appeared between bumpers.
Gunfire chased them into the narrow opening. A bullet hole appeared in the van’s rear window, high and to the right, inches from Mrs. Bendham’s head.
Jack had to stomp on the brake as they left the road for the soft shoulder. This way was too slow. The van shuddered and tipped left. Jack slowed further, spotted another gap and slipped back into the gauntlet. Speed, she reasoned, would put more distance between them and any pursuers, so better to risk the bullets.
The van’s wheels grabbed traction once more on the smooth pavement. The engine whined as Jack risked full speed in the narrow space. With abandoned cars cramming in on both sides, their speed seemed even faster than it was. They soon overtook the BMW. Jack pressed her horn to get the silver car to go faster.
Anna curled into a ti
ghter ball on the floor, covering her head. Mrs. Bendham ducked down as best she could in the back seat’s cramped quarters.
Jack pressed on her accelerator just enough to hit the rear bumper of the car in front of them. “Go! Go! Go!” she yelled as they hit a rise.
Jaimie and Theo looked back and understood why they weren’t dead. They’d seized the opportunity to follow the BMW north, but they’d never have made it if not for the refugees behind them. With the Spencers’ stab at escape, others saw their own chance to defy the roadblock.
The hill gave Jaimie and Theo a clear view of the chaos. Four men with rifles poured out of the white suburban that had been at their back bumper. Each man was dressed entirely in white, as if masked ice cream men had united to mount a rebellion.
A soldier went down, writhing and grabbing at a wound to his groin. The .50 caliber machine gun muzzle lit in short, bright bursts, and fired in loud, merciless barks.
To Jaimie, it looked like the men in white took turns dancing. ‘Riddled’ is the word, he thought. The synonyms of riddle seemed far apart. What a curious origin that word must have.
Each attacker dropped, one by one. They’d unwittingly saved the Spencers but lost to the machine gun.
Jaimie turned in his seat to watch the road ahead, thinking of poinsettias. Flowers had so many beautiful names. He hadn’t learned all those words yet.
He recalled each element of the scene he’d witnessed. How would a dictionary define and capture the totality of that event in a single word? Even the phrases he knew from his Latin dictionary seemed insufficient.
Jaimie decided he would have to create something new to encapsulate the event. For the first time, he felt the urge to write instead of read. If he could type like his sister, he would have. The boy mulled the words, turning and twisting them for examination. Yes. He liked the new taste and feel he found. The boy gave no thought to the man he’d run over. Instead, Jaimie discovered a poem of his own creation:
Riddles of poinsettias bloomed on each white suit, each a reaching, crimson wonderment.
Death, Jaimie discovered, invited powerful poetry. It didn’t rhyme, but ‘each’ and ‘reaching’ pleased him in a way he had not anticipated. Poetry was a precise — though not literal — language. Its creation was like discovering another eye that could see words and their interplay in a new, paradoxical dimension. Perhaps, if he tried harder to be flexible, to embrace poetic license, he would understand poetry’s justice one day. If he could understand what his father valued, maybe he could understand Theo’s dream of redemption at the Gateway to the Spirit World.
As soon as he’d tied one poetic line, he wanted to knot together another, longer poem. Perhaps, Jaimie mused, something about the way the van’s tires left a disappearing trail of blood, like footprints sifted away in shifting snow.
Only Theo saw his son’s small smile as Jaimie waited for another poem to reveal itself.
Grim fun is found between the scares
Lieutenant Francis Carron pulled up to the abandoned roadblock. He drove the same stolen police cruiser, an Interceptor with a broken muffler. The trailer he pulled rattled horribly. The scanner detected odd bits of military chatter. There was no radio traffic from law enforcement.
From what Carron could gather, the military’s command structure was broken. The Pentagon was built to withstand all kinds of attacks, but the Sutr virus was relentless.
Radio reports and nervous cross-talk on the scanner were grimly fascinating. Dallas was an armed garrison. Texas was at war with itself and Mexican drug gangs were defending their border with tanks.
From what he could gather from a weak signal coming in on AM radio late at night, Denver’s survivors had become a hippie commune. Carron wasn’t sure if the stoner on the mic was lying for his own amusement or addled from drugs.
Between endless repetitions of a Blue Oyster Cult song, Don’t Fear the Reaper, the DJ babbled. “We are mystics. We are gravity. We are the inverse of the converse in a crazy universe. Our Mile-high Club have taken Stephen King’s The Stand for our bible! Finally, we are righteous and happy. We’re out from under the corporate-industrial-military thumb of the Man, man!”
Carron didn’t know what that was about, except the guy talked a lot about God and how everyone in Vegas deserved to die.
“Same as it ever was,” Carron told the radio.
Carron stopped by a machine gun emplacement. Unburied bodies littered the pavement. Some corpses were all in white. Some wore camouflage. Most appeared to be civilians.
Carron got out of the car and jogged over to the gun. He’d lost a few pounds and was pleased that his breath was not shallow. He’d let himself go working a desk job in the military. Now he was more like his old self, feeling younger and stronger. Despite all the driving, he’d been careful to ration his food and make it last.
There was still plenty of canned food to be had in the kitchens of the dead, he was sure. However, he did not want to take the time or risk in scrounging meals. Thanks to Douglas Oliver’s supplies, he had plenty of food stuffed into the trailer he pulled for now.
Besides, Carron had a mission to fulfill. To maintain the will to survive, purpose was important. What would he do after he exacted revenge from the Spencers? He felt the need to command men again. Perhaps he could figure a way to become the new man in command. For that, he needed soldiers who were willing to be led into a brighter future. Someone had to be in charge. Why not him?
Someone had tried to move the heavy gun. They’d only succeeded in knocking it on its side. The people who attacked the roadblock had taken the ammo boxes that served the fallen gun.
The barricade ahead, a sea of cars and trucks parked end to end, remained impregnable. A traffic jam stretched out before him as far as he could see. The fields on either side of the checkpoint were filled with abandoned cars. The only thing the military seemed to have accomplished before the fall was to effectively prohibit travel east and west.
The only open road now wandered north. The highways were locked up unless refugees were so determined they’d risk walking the jammed roads.
The lieutenant had explored some of these traffic jams to the south. Even to a motorcyclist, no one would be able to navigate them much faster than a walking pace for long. Car accidents, jackknifed big rigs and traffic tangles made walls that demanded circuitous routes for anyone in a vehicle. Perhaps far out, ten miles or more, the traffic jams and blockades ended and refugees could travel unhindered. Unless all that open ground was mined by the National Guard, of course.
The military’s goal had been to isolate and quarantine the cities. They blocked highways to keep people from traveling. After the fall, accidents, lack of fuel, sickness and desperation ensured travel would remain hindered.
It seemed it was already too late for most cities. However, some small towns had survived the plague by brutally defending their borders, shooting trespassers and discouraging strangers. Successful survivors rooted out contagion and walled it off quickly, staying apart from the infected and shooting anyone who would compromise their security. That’s why the hospitals were dead. They took people in. The VA hospital on his own base had become a death house before word of the plague had spread through the fort’s hometown of Helena.
On a grander scale of destruction, San Francisco had been forced to billet soldiers returning from the Middle East when the troops were recalled. The Golden Gate City had fallen first and faster than any other American city. Citizens welcomed the veterans (some of whom already had Sutr before they deployed from the ships) and so everyone died of compassion. San Francisco had been too kind to survive in the new world.
From the safety of a military bunker in Montana, Lieutenant Carron had read the reports, watched America’s fall, and passed the incoming intelligence to his superiors until they fell sick, too. Some lived through Sutr’s fevers. Most died. Lt. Francis Carron didn’t so much as catch a cold.
Carron was about to turn to leav
e when he heard a footstep to his left. A young man in bloody camouflage appeared from behind a wrecked white pickup. He aimed a Bushmaster at Carron’s chest. “Stop! Move and I’ll kill you. Put your weapon on the deck or you’re a meat sack, read me?”
Carron couldn’t see the soldier’s eyes. He wore shooting glasses. He complied. “Easy, son. We’re on the same team.”
The soldier relaxed as soon as the Parabellum was on the macadam, but he was still guarded. “Anybody can put on a uniform.”
The lieutenant relaxed, as well. Despite the weapon, the private looked like a kid playing soldier. A young man’s impulsiveness and testosterone could be dangerous, but this one looked too exhausted and underfed.
Carron had always wanted shooting glasses like that — Crossbow Suppressors — but he would have felt foolish wearing them to work just to man a desk instead of a post. The men who guarded the bunker would have mocked him for wearing an accessory meant for “real” soldiers. Of course, all those guards were dead now. It was time to reinvent himself again.
“Identify yourself, Private.”
“Who’s asking…sir?” He aimed at Carron’s head.
“Lieutenant Frank Carron,” — he’d always hated Francis — “from Fort William Henry Harrison, Lewis and Clark County, Montana.”
“Then what’s with the police car, sir?”
“Commandeered.”
“What’s in the trailer, sir?”
“Not much. I like to stretch out. It’s easier to sleep in the trailer than set up a tent each night or sleep in the car.”
The soldier stepped closer but Carron still couldn’t see his eyes. “I answered your questions. Time you answered mine. Where’s the officer in charge?”
“No officers.”
“The virus get them all?”
“No, sir. We weren’t doing too badly, but militia came through. Ran the roadblock. We got into a firefight. We had the choke point and the road locked down, but more poured out of the woods behind us. Anybody who didn’t run got shot.”
“You didn’t run. How come you’re not dead, Private?”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 46
