“So what do we do now?”
Lance Corporal Stewart Pendle stepped forward. “You stay together and tight and we go into town. We’ll find someone in authority and — ”
“Claim this land in the name of the Queen?” Desi suggested.
One of the Marines, a beefy fellow named Dysart, grumbled at the policeman. “Bad form, Guard. We’ve got a king now. Parliament’s wiped out. We’re going back to the old ways until we can set things right.”
“The return of the monarchy’s high stature? That’s a fret.”
Pendle sighed. “Box formation, gentlemen. Go!”
Dayo slapped Desi’s shoulder. “Don’t mess with them. They’re in serious man mode.”
No one came out to greet them. No curtains moved as the group made its way down the street.
“Aadi,” Sinjin-Smythe said, “when your children were born, how did that make you feel? I mean, besides marvelous. Tell me what it was like deep down.”
The little, brown man did not answer immediately. His eyes went to Aasa and Aastha who walked behind two of the Royal Marines. Dayo held their hands, swinging arms slightly as if moving to music only they could hear.
“No matter what I say, I’ll sound like a prick for telling you the truth.”
“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“Okay. Besides feeling marvelous, it’s scary as hell. When Aasa was born, I walked down a hospital corridor with her in my arms. Imagine holding a billion dollars but it’s made of crystal. That’s what it felt like. I had to think about how to walk, like I was so overwhelmed, I’d almost forgotten how.”
“What else?”
“When Aastha was born, the moment I held her, she locked eyes with me and I thought, here’s another precious little girl who will break my heart someday when she grows up and moves away. For a while there, when they’re two and three, they still think you’re cool and they want to be with you forever.”
“Must have been hard, going back to work and leaving them.”
“I couldn’t miss a shift! I had to pick up extra shifts. Still, parents all believe one thing they can’t ever tell anyone who isn’t a parent.”
“But you’ll tell me because I asked for it.”
“Because you want to know what you’re missing, right?”
“Tell me.”
Aadi took a deep breath. “When they were born, I really thought somebody should send me a check just for adding something so lovely to the world. I shouldn’t have to work and I could spend all my time with my kids, the way it used to be before the world became what it became. In ancient days, you had a farm and you spent all your time with family. Before tiny pay checks and punching a clock and all.”
“I think we can safely refer to that era as our peak. The Dark Ages are back. You will get more time with your kids, now.”
Aadi smiled. “The truth that no one wants to say aloud to anyone without kids is, having a child redefines love. I thought I knew love. For my wife, I’d pull her out of the path of an oncoming train. But for my kids? I’d lay on the tracks if it helped them.”
The doctor and Aadi bumped shoulders as the group moved into a narrow street. Sinjin-Smythe checked Aadi with his hip. “You’re right! That does make you sound like a self-absorbed, preachy prick.”
Aadi smiled. “There you go! Give as good as you get, Doctor!”
“While we’re at it,” Sinjin-Smythe said, “What’s with your names? For God’s sake, the ego on you! Couldn’t your wife have said no? Which do you love more, the letter a or yourself? I once knew a chap named Arnold who called his poor daughter Arlene, but you? Aadi, Aasa, Aastha? You went overboard —”
The zombies attacked the group from alleys on either side of the street in two running packs. They took down their first two victims before a snarl was uttered or a single shot was fired.
These are the thoughts that keep us awake
If she had to, Jack thought she could pry open a locked gas tank panel with a flat screwdriver. However, she didn’t want to take the time. Every moment they stayed still was another moment of exposure.
The first two cars she tried were parked neatly on the left shoulder. They were locked, as if their owners expected to return. Jack thought it likely, before the bulldozers or tanks came through, that this stretch of highway had been a hopeless traffic jam.
The government had commanded everyone to stay home and wait for help. When that help didn’t come, people finally disobeyed and fled. Unfortunately, many had found themselves at the Brickyard Refugee Camp. Jack shuddered. They would have done better not to depend on the government at all.
Just minutes before, Jack had trusted a dangerous man because he knew a bit of bible verse. Theo had trusted Douglas Oliver because — why? Proximity? Need? But that wasn’t fair. She had trusted the old man, too.
Oliver had wanted to fill a van with gas cans and make a run for Maine with them. It might have worked out if not for Lieutenant Carron’s rogue militia.
She had been wrong to trust Chester, but the man with the long knife and the stolen BMW had taught her something important. She’d overestimated her ability to judge people. Life and death situations make English majors with unfinished masters theses in Elizabethan poetry feel awfully stupid.
She found a blue Toyota on the far side of the ditch. It was smashed and the driver’s door hung open, but the gas hatch release worked when she pulled it. She sucked on the hose but made sure to get out of the way before the fuel hit her lips. She stood stiffly, arched her back and rubbed sore lumbar muscles.
Jack had worried her children would die from Sutr-X. Now she worried they’d be murdered for their supplies. That seemed a more legitimate concern since they had all been exposed to the virus through Theo and no one even had a cough or a sniffle.
Worse, Carron or the thing from the Brickyard, might be hunting them. She had to assume the military would be searching for them so they could use Jaimie. Or perhaps they’d demand vengeance for the monster he’d unleashed.
Back at the Brickyard, Merritt and the doctor on the computer had spoken of zombies, as if this was a silly B movie. From where she stood and from what she’d seen, that didn’t feel so silly anymore.
The sick man with bright, white eyes had sent Ogilvy and two more men flying before throwing Dr. Merritt through a glass wall. She would never forget the bedlam reaching from the pit of the refugee camp.
Jack could not guess what the white-eyed man really was, but — her eyes shifted to Jaimie — somehow her son had known. He’d released that thing on the camp. She hoped the army had contained the threat, but it hadn’t sounded like they’d succeeded.
As she glanced up and down the narrow highway littered with steel, the enormity of the plague hit her again. She wanted to cry. “Should have bought more test tubes,” she said. “Sutr is far more powerful than Al Qaida ever was.”
Mrs. Bendham still sat in the back of the van, on the lookout for cars following them. The others had gone into the tree line to relieve themselves.
The gas can wasn’t quite full. Another car sat at the bottom of the embankment.
“Make it fast!” she called out across the road. She hurried along to the next wreck, the soft sand giving way under her feet. She slipped and slid down the short hill on her bum.
It was a green, two-door Hyundai. Judging from its bends and dents in the roof and sides, the car had rolled over several times on its last journey. However, the car had landed on its wheels and, no doubt due to the forgiving sand of the embankment, all the windows were intact. It was unlocked. She opened the driver’s door to pop the lock on the gas tank.
The stench from the car hit her in the face like a cloud hand closing over her mouth and nose.
Again, the flies. Eyes open, she saw a cloud of flies and the horror of rotting flesh beneath them. Maggots wriggled and roiled and fed.
Eyes squeezed shut, Jack was back in Brandy’s bathroom. Brandy’s eyes
were not closed. Her head was turned and flies crawled over her friend’s staring eyes. Brandy said, “Give up, Jack.”
The corpse raised a wrecked arm stained dark red with dried blood. “I gave up. It’s not so bad.” The flies stayed. The rictus grin was new.
Jack opened her eyes to face the Hyundai’s interior. She closed the door as quickly as she could, fell to her hands and knees and threw up.
Would she ever think of Brandy again without seeing the gash in her arm and the flies feeding? Had the insects erased her sweet memories of happy, bitchy, irrepressible Brandy forever?
It saddened her, but yes. Jack was sure she couldn’t think of Brandy without seeing her friend, a bloody naked feast, dead in her bathtub. Or worse, grinning in her bathtub and inviting Jack to join her.
Jack stood and, despite herself, looked inside the car. The sun had cooked the body in the back seat. The hot car was a crock pot. It stewed the carcass of what was once a relatively happy, coffee-drinking taxpayer. The occupant was a sloppy, liquid mess.
She shouldn’t have looked. If Anna and Jaimie got sick tonight, there was a better than even chance that tomorrow morning she’d give up and drive them all into a tree at full speed.
What else should she worry about instead of infection or brutal murder? Car accident on a lonely road? Lightning strike? Cholera or an infected scratch that turns gangrenous? God’s wrath? Rivers of blood? Killer asteroids? White-eyed killers?
She took a breath. Food, clothing, shelter. The van was shelter. The spring heat necessitated water more than worry about clothes. Douglas Oliver had stored several cases of water in the rear of the van. It should be enough. The old schemer had also packed cans of soup, energy bars and chocolate bars. His plan seemed to give them the most food for the space allowed.
Jack worried that the chocolate would make them more thirsty and the water was too precious to burn through fast. She had instructed Mrs. Bendham, their self-appointed supply sergeant, to dole out the soup since it dealt with nutritional needs and thirst at the same time. Their emergency supply would be whatever Mrs. Bendham had squirrelled away in her massive blue cooler.
Jack sucked on the hose, waited too long for the gas to come and threw up again a moment later. Her eyes watered uncontrollably and her gums burned. She spat, but she couldn’t get the taste of gasoline out of her mouth. She pulled her bottle of water out of her jacket and tried flushing. Then she worried that with all the swishing and spitting she was wasting precious water.
She thought they’d packed all they needed for the trip. At that moment, Jack would have traded all her water for one full bottle of Scope mouthwash.
We pray for sleep, our minds to take
The infected took down the two lead Marines first. The next bunch went for the little girls, heedless of bullets and concentrating their forces on the easiest prey.
Aadi sprang forward, angry and sure the doctor had jinxed his aspirations for more time with his girls. He swung haymakers at a snarling woman with his bare fists, knocking her down and putting himself in front of Aastha.
A teenage boy went for Aasa. He had a shoulder wound so deep, one arm hung useless. The infected boy reached for Aasa with his good arm. Sinjin-Smythe kicked him in a shin and pushed him into the oncoming mob.
“Get out of the way!” Pendle bellowed at his charges. Despite his warning, he and Cameron kept firing. There were too many infected to hold their fire.
Sinjin-Smythe felt the breath of a bullet whizzing by his head as one of the attackers fell at his feet, brains splattered.
A tall woman in her late forties with white blonde hair, yelled to the refugees. “Koma hingao!” She stood in the door to a shop across the street, waving the refugees in.
Dayo pulled Aastha away from an infected man reaching for the little girl and kicked out, planting the heel of her foot in the man’s solar plexus. He went down without a sound, the air knocked from him. Aadi scooped up Aastha as Sinjin-Smythe yanked Aasa up and followed Aadi toward the shop. Desi pulled Dayo behind him and backed up, raising his Walther.
These infected were unlike the white-eyed terror Sinjin-Smythe and Desi had seen attack Merritt in Indianapolis. They acted like dumb, raging animals. These were like the Sutr-Zs they’d fought in London. They lunged, jaws snapping, and they weren’t afraid of Desi’s pistol until he shot one of them in the face.
When they saw their lead attacker go down with a scream, two others who had come at Desi turned and ran for the alley. Their mistake was pausing to try to drag one of the fallen Marines with them. The cannibal atop Dysart growled at the pair, not wanting to give up his prey.
Lance Corporal Pendle shot each of the snarling trio with three precise head shots. “Our intel was wrong!”
“I don’t know why you’d say that!” Desi yelled.
The two remaining Marines — Pendle and Cameron — kept firing on the nearest zombies until they went down. Then they concentrated their fire on the infected who had brought down their comrades. So enraptured were the ghouls in their feeding frenzy, they ignored the gunfire. When shot, they fell atop their victims.
The Marine closest to the alley had lost his rifle in the first moment of the attack. However, he had managed to kill one of the infected. His dirk’s bloody hilt was still clutched in his fist, the thick, triangular blade buried in the forehead of the young woman who had leapt upon him.
The remaining cannibals, a dozen or so, split into two groups and retreated back up the alleys from which they’d come.
The Marine named Cameron switched magazines in a quick, practiced move. “Like bloody sharks, they are! Hardly know when enough’s enough!”
One of the Marines was still alive, but losing blood from gashes at his hands, ankles and head. Lance Corporal Pendle knelt beside the fallen Marine, assessing his wounds. “Edwards? Can you talk?”
The Marine shook his head and one of his eyes rolled up.
The civilians all stood at the doorway to the shop as the woman who had called to them urged them inside. “They’ll be back!” she said in clipped English. “You must come inside!”
Pendle didn’t take his eyes off his fallen man. “Doctor! Can you spare a minute?”
Sinjin-Smythe trotted over, peering at the patient over Pendle’s shoulder.
“It doesn’t look too bad, Doctor.”
The virologist bent closer. “It’s not the depth of the bites and scrapes. It’s what’s in them.”
The Lance Corporal sighed. “There’s nothing to be done, then?”
“You know there isn’t.”
“Can you learn anything from him?”
Before the virologist could answer, the Royal Marine’s eyes rolled back into focus and he began to try to get his feet under him. He did not growl. He hissed as if something about his breathing was damaged. It was probably a broken rib, but the man was undeterred. He needed to feed.
“Cameron?” Lance Corporal Pendle said. “A favor?”
Cameron had already lined up his shot. He hesitated only long enough to say, “Sorry, mate.”
Pendle scooped up Dysart’s rifle and fallen pack just as the zombies attacked again, this time in greater numbers.
Amid the birches, between the meanings
Jaimie walked out of the tree line with his father. The boy had peed in the woods.
“You haven’t done that enough,” Theo said. “It’s a part of your education that has been sorely lacking. We urinated in the woods for millions of years. It’s really only lately that anything else has been an option. The last couple of hundred years, I mean.”
“You okay, Mom?” Anna called down the embankment.
“Finishing up crying and puking!” Jack was still on her knees. The gas can, almost full, sat before her. She held the end of the hose in her fist. Fuel dribbled out around her thumb. “I can’t clamp this forever. I need you to empty the gas into the van quick and then come back for more. Ask Mrs. Bendham to find another container to carry gas.”
Anna picked up the gas can. Jaimie walked down to the car and, before she could stop him, looked in the Hyundai’s windows.
He pinched his nose with one hand and made a face. “Liquefaction,” he said.
Her son’s lack of reaction to suffering — ‘flat affect’ psychologists called it —disturbed her. And yet, she envied him. “Numb is better than hysterical, I guess.”
“Agreed,” Anna said. “And I resolve to get lots of psychotherapy when the crap has stopped hitting the ceiling fan.”
It took the gas from three abandoned cars for her to fill the van’s tank. The cars must have traveled far before they’d been abandoned or their occupants stopped to die. Jack scrubbed her lips with her forearm, spitting gas droplets from her burning mouth.
At last, she had no tears. “Are you there, God? It’s me, Jacqueline. If you could do us a small miracle and make this gas taste like wine…well, You could at least do that.” She smiled a moment and another tear ran down her cheek. She closed her eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” Jack said. “We have to push on to Maine as fast as we can. I hope your brother is there waiting for us. I thought maybe we could go look for him in Chicago, but it’s too crazy out here. We can’t risk even trying to go into a city. The road wouldn’t let us if we tried.”
Theo shrugged and nodded, but it was Jaimie who spoke. It was the longest sentence they had ever heard him speak.
“We are not unsaved,” he said.
His parents smiled.
Later, as Jaimie slept, he heard the doctor with the strange name tell the nice Irish policeman about Wiggins.
As soon as the word Wiggins came to him, the dream shifted and Jaimie saw him. Wiggins fed on the neck of a man in uniform who wasn’t quite dead enough yet. Wiggins shook his head and was covered in pumping carotid arterial spray.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 48
