The letters ‘KCMO’ were painted clearly down the side of the Interceptor. Had Jaimie stood, he would have recognized that trailer. Had he been able to understand the heavily stylized font painted on its side, he would have read: Mere Entertainments.
* * *
Jaimie closed his eyes to the sky’s torrent. He listened to the Om and let his mind reach down, past the rotting bodies beneath him in the freshly turned dirt. Jaimie felt for the turning of the earth. At the mid-latitudes, he’d read that the earth spins at eight-hundred miles per hour. Even so, Jaimie could only barely feel the planet’s subtle rotation.
The earth spun Jaimie back into sleep. As his son fell into new dreams, Theo faded, too.
The police cruiser’s door closed with a hollow thunk!
Lieutenant Francis Carron stalked through the dark toward the tent. He passed the sleeping boy within a dozen paces.
Each one and everything is about something other
The boy waited in Dr. Sinjin-Smythe’s dreams. He sat cross-legged and slumped in a birch forest, eyes closed.
At first, the virologist assumed the boy was meditating, but he slept. As the doctor floated nearby, the trees drew closer. They weren’t simply birch bark. Skeins of black text wrapped around the paper of each white trunk.
When Sinjin-Smythe tried to read the words, he came gently to earth. He found himself standing barefoot in cool moss before the boy. To his left, impenetrable Latin wrapped around a trunk like a coiled snake.
When he leaned on a tree to his right, a low voice came to him, quoting Much Ado About Nothing. “They that touch pitch will be defiled.” The words arrived like a low electric current humming through his brain. Each word had a unique shape and taste and color. Surprised, Sinjin-Smythe stepped back but found himself compelled to touch another tree, tentatively, with both bare hands.
This time, the message came from Macbeth. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” The tree bark sliced him and the doctor pulled his hands back too late. He expected blood, but no. His thumbs tingled as if he’d stuck them in an electrical socket.
“Tingling thumbs,” the boy said. “A bad omen in Shakespeare’s day.”
“You live in a forest of words?”
“I live between meanings.” The boy opened his eyes and looked up. “I love Latin, its concision and the way the words feel. My father is the one who loves Shakespeare.”
The doctor saw himself in the mirrored eyes. Was this how the boy saw him? A weak, terrified man who didn’t know what to do and couldn’t do anything right? Or could the doctor change his reflection? The zombies terrified him, of course, but he hadn’t expected such shame at his paralyzing fear.
“Someone’s chasing me, too, Doctor. Powerful forces are coming together against anyone who is still human.”
“I know.”
“You should hurry to join the fight, Craig.”
The boy uttered a Latin phrase. Though the doctor somehow understood the individual words, put together, it made no sense to him.
In the lucid dream (or did this qualify as a vision?) Sinjin-Smythe saw a dark figure pass behind the boy amid the forest’s shadows. The boy didn’t see the thing stalking him. Though the doctor could not see its face, white fangs shone in the black silhouette.
The doctor pointed and shouted, “Look out! Turn around! Watch out behind you! It’s there! There!”
“It’s merely a shade here. When I go back, he’ll be waiting. ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams,’” Jaimie said. “Hamlet got it right. I’m safe in my forest of words. This isn’t the bad dream. The nightmare is your world.”
“We all want to curl warm under a blanket with a good book when a storm rages outside, but my world and yours is the same, isn’t it?”
“Not really. I prefer this place, warm under the blanket.”
A black blanket decorated with shining stars appeared in the air behind the boy. It hovered for a moment and settled over the boy’s shoulders as if placed by invisible hands. Jaimie sighed softly.
Sinjin-Smythe stared, his mind reeling and rebelling at what he’d witnessed.
“The enemy is so determined because they’re sure they are right,” Jaimie said. “Stupid people often win just because they’re louder, will say anything and, most important, they are certain. Stupid people adore certainty. That’s the danger in being more intelligent and patient. People who allow nuance lose debates. Smart people lose wars all the time.”
“Are you saying I’ve already lost the war against the virus?”
“No. I’m saying you haven’t even joined the right war yet. Thank you for your warning about the man in the shadows, Doctor. I’ll go back and deal with him. Mirabilia!”
Wonders, the virologist thought. Mirabilia means wonders! How do I know that?
The boy heard his unspoken words. The mirrors locked on the doctor. “We’re all changing in its grip. You understand because you rise to answer the call. In the war for the future, only the deniers will remain deaf and dumb.
“People ate themselves to death and when the heart attacks came, it was a shock but not a surprise. People lived in Tornado Alley but didn’t move. Instead, they kept rebuilding until the next tornado and the next. The power of denial is an awesome thing. Humans would have denied the oceans’ rise until the tide took their own houses away.”
“You don’t think much of us, do you?”
“Not so. I love some of you. Others? The others make it difficult to love them. I’m not here for everyone. Some prefer their delusions to my illusions. Life will give them contusions.” He smiled. “Not everyone is worth fighting for, Craig, even if they haven’t done anything wrong. Being innocent isn’t enough to save anyone. To win, you have to take action and you have to do what’s right.”
“And if I do what’s right, I’ll survive?”
“I can’t see the future, Craig. We have to make the future. We’re manufacturing it now. That’s what Shiva’s doing, too. If you want something different from her vision, make your future. But to merely survive? Aim higher than that or Shiva will be right when she calls you a slave. You want to know why I’m the messenger. All I know is, the Way of Things chose me.”
“Why?”
“People who don’t talk too much perceive more, so there’s that.”
“And the Way of Things chose me for what? What is the right war?”
Jaimie seemed to ignore the question. “Funny how call and cull are so close in sound, isn’t it? And how a call can lead to a cull? And the word warn contains the word war. And the double meaning of dumb…well, never mind. Now, please heed my invitation. You’re needed in Iceland, now, but come quickly.”
Mother, father, sister and strange brother
The virologist awoke with a start and rubbed his eyes in a fog. He looked around the small, dim room blearily. The couch had a floral pattern. Someone had covered him with a scratchy, wool blanket. The cracks between the wooden boards over the window glowed with bright sunshine. Aside from the boarded windows, Astrid’s house looked like any other cozy home, but for the soldier cleaning his assault rifle on the floor by the front door. “How are you doing, Cameron?”
“How do you think? Those things are roaming the streets looking for snacks and I still haven’t figured out how to tell the lady of the house there’s no room for her on the sub. I figured I shouldn’t tell her until we’re ready to leave. No sense dragging out the drama.”
“Are the others up?”
“At the neighbor’s, scrounging.”
The houses along the street were all connected. It was the Royal Marine who suggested breaking through the wall to get to the next house instead of daring to go outside. The next residence held a case of instant oatmeal in the kitchen and rotting corpses in the bedroom.
Judging by the contents of their bedside tables and the smell of the place, the husband had succumbed to Sutr some t
ime ago. The wife swallowed all the pills hoping to fall asleep and never awake. An easy death eluded her, however. She’d thrown up on the fancy lace gown she’d chosen for suicide. She died choking on vomit.
Sinjin-Smythe watched the Royal Marine’s deft hands as he put his rifle back together with a practiced series of clicks. Cameron worked automatically but his eyes said the man’s mind was far away.
“I asked about you, Cameron. You personally. How are you?”
The thousand-yard stare ebbed and he came back to the present. “Do you know anything about the Iran-Iraq war?”
“There was one. Besides that, nothing. What about it? You had something to do with Iran?”
The Royal Marine laughed. “I’m only twenty-eight! No, no secret missions there. But we studied it. War in all its forms. The first thing they tell you in training is to look left and right and one of those guys is dead or bound for a wheelchair. It’s supposed to shake us up and see who’s likely to go barmy. Instead, you look left, you look right and you think, I’ll go to this guy’s funeral and that guy’ll piss in a bag for the rest of his short, miserable life.”
Sinjin-Smythe rubbed his face and waited. When Cameron turned his attention to reloading his rifle’s magazines, he could wait no more. “About the Iran-Iraq war?”
“Ah. Yeah. The Iranians had a tactic for overwhelming Iraq positions. They called it the Wave. It was very effective.”
“What did they do?” By the look in Cameron’s eyes, Sinjin-Smythe wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“They sent the children first. Mostly young boys. They sent them swarming through minefields ahead of the real attack force. The children cleared the mines with their own bodies. If they made it through that, they ran at the Iraqi positions. Soldiers were forced to shoot children. People who’ve never been to war just shrug and say that’s war.”
“You don’t feel that way.”
Cameron paused and looked at Sinjin-Smythe. “Another bit of history. A bunch of Nazis sit around a table. Their conference is to figure out the final solution to what they called The Jewish Question.”
“Ovens.”
“Sure. Everybody agrees that was evil. No arguments. But do you know one of the arguments for the ovens was that it was humane?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not for the Jews. They didn’t care about them, obviously. But they were concerned they’d make unfeeling monsters out of their own troops. Bullets aren’t just inefficient. Somebody has to pull the trigger and live with themselves afterward.”
Sinjin-Smythe looked at the floor. “No one could blame you for the zombies you killed.”
“But they weren’t zombies! That’s stupid! They were sick people. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’ve got rabies, that’s all. Not long ago, breakfast wasn’t somebody’s neck. It was tea and crumpets over the morning crossword. Or whatever cold fish they eat in bleeding Iceland!”
Sinjin-Smythe looked at the ceiling, but the flecked cream paint offered no grand solutions. He shrugged. “All I can say is, thank you for saving my life and those of my friends.”
“Third history lesson they didn’t teach you in school: the Nazis at Dieppe. It was one of the worst military disasters in history. Canadians were trapped on a beach and getting mowed down by German machine guns.
“Men on machine guns fire in short bursts. They teach us that if your burst of fire takes longer than it takes to say, ‘sonofabitch’, your barrel will overheat.” Cameron gave a grim smile. “Maybe they taught the German gunners to say, ‘gott in himmel!’ The Nazis were monsters, but after massacring so many, even some of those gunners went into shock. You kill too many, it doesn’t feel like winning anymore.”
“You regret yesterday?”
“I’d save you all again, Doctor. Sure I would. But I’m worried about the future. How many monsters do you shoot before you become a monster? If the Nazis worried about it, certainly I should. There’s a great myth going around that only recruits, desk jockeys and the dumbest soldiers believe. We all say shooting the enemy isn’t supposed to matter.”
“It obviously matters to you. I’m glad.”
“It would be easier if it didn’t matter. I’d much rather be shooting anyone in a uniform. I’m worried I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life. You already do.”
That gave Sinjin-Smythe pause. “What do you mean?”
Cameron shrugged. “Besides the snoring? What does, ‘Montani semper liberi’ mean? You said it over and over — ”
“Like I was trying to memorize it.”
It was Cameron’s turn to look surprised. “Aye.”
“It means ‘Mountaineers are always free men.’”
Cameron stared at him. “What — ”
“I have no idea and you wouldn’t believe me if I tried to explain.”
A horn blared across the zombie-infested city three times. It came from the harbor. Reykjavik echoed with the short, sharp blasts. Howls of the infected answered.
The doctor leaped from the couch. “The rescue — ”
“Civvies get in here, front and center!” Cameron bawled. “That noise will bring every monster running!”
“What do we do?” Sinjin-Smythe asked.
“Run faster.”
“Oh…as long as you have a plan.”
Season 2, Episode 5
This Plague of Days
Robert Chazz Chute
Season 2
Episode 5
No matter how safe you think you are,
you will be tested.
*
Our daydreams hint at our purpose.
At night? Dreams fend off nightmares and nothingness.
A dream is your brain, desperate and struggling to breathe
Existence while it still can.
*
Scientific intelligence is our best hope.
When we’ve lost that, we’ll revert to magic words.
(Nona maji, kono no mai, patakai, patakai!)
Magic is the intuitive, compassionate
route to hope when all else fails.
Fiction can touch the human heart
when you’re out of rib spreaders.
*
Anyone can fall when our wings are clipped.
The Fallen are the most dangerous.
We have nothing to lose.
We are more lizard than brains.
~ Notes from The Last Cafe
*
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space — were it not that I have had bad dreams.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Last Cafe lies to the East
The infected ate Astrid a hundred yards from the rescue ship.
The boat was supposed to be an American submarine, but a Canadian Arctic research vessel named the CCGS Amundsen arrived instead. When the captain blew the ship’s horn three times, the refugees knew their ride had arrived. Unfortunately, that sound was also the dinner bell for every zombie in Reykjavik.
Crisp air seared Cameron’s lungs as he ran behind the civilians, urging them to run faster. Aasa and Aastha couldn’t run as fast as the adults, so Dayo and Sinjin-Smythe carried the little girls. Desi ran alongside them, his Walther at the ready. Aadi cleared the way with a length of steel pipe.
The Sutr-Z zombies couldn’t talk and they weren’t smart, but they weren’t dumb enough to get away from easily. Astrid had been behind Aadi when the infected attacked in a narrow spot between houses. There weren’t many attackers, but they came from both sides.
In a blink, Astrid was forced to the ground on her belly. The infected man who stood on her low back reached down and pulled at Astrid’s blonde-white hair. As she arched her back in pain, Astrid cried out and hair tore from her head in fistfuls. Another zombie, a large dishevelled woman with a conspicuously broken nose, clamped her teeth around the meat of Astrid’s calf.
Cameron shot from the hip. The bullet made a very
neat hole in Astrid’s forehead. The back of her skull, however, became a bowl full of gray and white gore.
The Royal Marine almost threw up when the man on her back glanced his way before lunging to feast on Astrid’s brains. Cameron shuddered. Had he seen something wry in the ghoul’s face? Had that been the hint of a smirk? A thank you?
He was about to empty his magazine into the infected. It was Desi who reached back and pulled Cameron out of the trap by his pack.“Go! Go! Go!”
The European refugees pounded along a concrete pier, heading for the ship. There were already a few zombies ahead of them, trying to board the boat. Men with boathooks deterred them with savage blows. The gaffs were effective, but still more zombies rushed forward.
Seventy-five yards from the Amundsen, Cameron threw a grenade over his shoulder. The shrapnel did damage to his pursuers, but he thought the explosive would buy him more time. Instead, the concussion seemed to enrage the remaining infected further.
Running against the wind, the Royal Marine fired behind him, shooting wildly as he ran. Reykjavik housed more than 120,000 people and it seemed like they each wanted a bite. He dared to glance back at fifty yards. He wished he hadn’t. They were gaining.
Aadi brained a couple of zombies with his steel pipe, swinging his makeshift weapon like a sword. That strategy proved successful until he made the mistake of trying to run the pipe through the heart of an approaching ghoul. It stuck. The zombie screeched and went down. The pipe stood erect from his gored torso like a flagpole.
Aadi paused to try to retrieve his weapon, but the old man he’d skewered held fast with both hands. Aadi abandoned the pipe and ran forward, pushing and kicking zombies out of the way.
“Come back!” Desi yelled. “Let me take point!”
Aadi was brave, but too small for his tactics. Pushing his way forward, he reached a wall of big Icelanders bent on boarding the Amundsen. One of the big men turned and grabbed Aadi by the throat.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 54
