The Sutr-Z zombie lunged for Aadi’s face. Instead of taking the young father’s nose, the muzzle of Desi’s pistol broke the zombie’s teeth. Blood sprayed Aadi and Desi as the policeman fired a shot through his attacker’s brain pan.
Aadi stumbled back as Desi spun the little man away to protect him from the zombies at the edge of the pier. Desi used his weight to push three more zombies into the water. The infected didn’t reach the water. The wind and waves pushed the ship closer and the bright red hull crushed their bodies against the wharf. The sound their bodies made were three thuds and wet snaps, pulping bone and flesh as they were smeared against the wharf before sliding into Reykjavik harbor.
Even in his anger, Desi cringed. “Ooh!”
The deck crew might have gored the Irish policeman with a boathook, too, but for his uniform and the pistol in his hand. When another two zombies came at him from each side, a gaff cracked one cannibal’s skull. Another crew member used a long, pointed gaff to spear the attacker and pull him into the cold water by the zombie’s skewered intestines.
The cannibals made no sound until they were gored. Then the rusty creak that came from their broken throats and addled brains built to what sounded like angry seagull cries.
Each holding a little girl tight, Dayo and Sinjin-Smythe raced past Desi and leapt aboard. Fortunately, the Amundsen’s crew members saw them coming and caught the refugees as they landed so Aasa and Aastha didn’t crash into the deck.
The way cleared, Desi jumped aboard the Amundsen, whirled and fired the Walther until it clicked. His target, a tall zombie, towered above Aadi. The ghoul looked down at his wounds, apparently confused. He teetered and collapsed backward. Desi screamed for Aadi and Cameron to run as he reloaded the pistol.
At twenty yards, the zombies caught up with the Royal Marine. Cameron swung the butt of his rifle and took down two, but four more runners were close behind. Two grabbed his backpack and pulled him off his feet. He fired his weapon from his back and, in a moment, he was up and sprinting for the rescue ship again.
Another zombie clawed at him and grabbed his pack. Cameron slipped it off his shoulders and kept going.
Ten yards.
A woman launched herself at him from the side. Cameron whirled and she missed him completely. Cameron pulled the trigger but his ammunition had run dry. He sprinted on.
At five yards from the rescue ship, another zombie came at Cameron from behind a shipping container. Cameron buried his knife deep in the infected man’s eye socket and ran.
One yard.
It was Aadi who grabbed Cameron’s arm with one hand and pulled the Royal Marine’s head back to expose his neck. Aadi went for the jugular.
North of the Sun On Earth and the Queen Beast
Two huge spotlights sat at the rear of the tent, their beams roaming the canvas walls. The circles of light chased each other, their lazy swoops forming a mesmerizing figure eight. There were no chairs in the tent. The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd sat on beaten grass.
Around the vast tent Jack noticed small families. All the men were bearded and held lit flashlights. Many women linked arms as they chanted the Om. The adults formed circles, their backs to the smallest children, penning them in. Was that to control the children or to protect them from strangers? Everyone’s clothes needed washing. Despite the sweet grass at their feet and the high ceiling above, clammy sweat hung like an invisible cloud over the gathering.
Jack reminded herself that while they had holed up in Oliver’s house in comfort, many of these people might have fled their homes weeks or even months ago and hadn’t eaten properly.
Everyone looked too thin for their clothes, gray and hollow-eyed hungry. Before the pandemic, Jack had thought she should lose twenty pounds. She’d meant to accomplish that by eliminating bread and pasta, replacing her regular lunch with a salad and hitting her treadmill harder. Instead, stress had done the job.
The grass is still green, Jack thought. They haven’t been here long. Could this be the same group that killed all those refugees at Mackinac for their supplies? Did they kill all those people and burn through their food?
The stage was a beat-up wooden riser. Two men sat off to the side of the little stage with drums and a guitar at their feet. The drummer’s set lay in a tangle of leather straps. Jack assumed that was loot from a high school marching band. The musicians sat so close together, their knees touched. They passed a bottle of wine back and forth. Drink, pass. Drink, pass. They did not join the Om.
Dahlia appeared at Jack’s side and gently pulled her toward the front. The whip-thin woman leaned close to Jack’s ear. “I brought you in, dear. Grin and sit up front with me, close to the seer.”
Taking Jack’s elbow, Dahlia guided her forward. The chanters sat cross-legged or with their legs stretched in front of them. Jack and Dahlia had to step over and around people. Most spent no effort to make way.
A few men and women at the front lay on their bellies, their arms outstretched before them. Their fingertips almost, but not quite, touched the wooden riser. The congregants’ worshipful pose cranked Jack’s jaw tighter.
Anna caught Jack’s eye and waved, not more than a few feet away. Dahlia flashed her too-many-teeth smile and motioned for them to sit together. Jack swallowed her anger but acquiesced. As she sat, Jack hissed at her daughter, “You were supposed to stay with the van!”
Before Anna could reply, the chant picked up a faster cadence. As loud as it had been, it grew louder. It felt like the sound might swallow them. Jack wondered how long she could listen and not fall into a trance.
As she searched the crowd, most closed their eyes and gave themselves to the rhythm, rocking forward and back. However, nearby she identified new people like herself who must have been caught at the roadblock and escorted here. The new ones were easy to spot. They didn’t chant. Instead, they looked around, warily.
With each swoop of the powerful spotlights, Jack spotted a haggard, middle-aged man sitting nearby. His skin was so white he looked like he had never seen the sun. With each fresh illumination, she could see his rust-red hair flecked with gray. His thick-lipped mouth formed the unmistakable “Om,” but his gaze, and his flashlight beam, had settled on Anna. He played his light over her chest.
His look reminded Jack of the little man, Bently, who had peered in through their dining room window and stared at Anna. He, too, had done so without a hint of self-consciousness. Jack felt her jaws clamp tighter, the edges of her teeth coming together hard. She wished she had another can of gasoline so she could blow this cretin up. Or she could run him over with the van.
Jack leaned back, trying to obstruct the man’s view of her daughter, or at least embarrass him. The man’s lust was undeterred. He simply ignored her and leaned over so he could continue.
Anna noticed what the man was doing. She looked his way, smiled coyly and then made an angry pumping motion as she gave him the middle finger.
Jack sat closer to Anna and yelled into her ear above the din of the Om. “How often do men ogle you? You seem a little too used to it.”
“I’m hot, Mom,” Anna yelled back.
“You are a beautiful girl, Anna.”
“No, Mom. I’m hot!”
“Oh.”
Jack was screwing up her courage to join Anna in giving the lech the same gesture when Dahlia stalked toward the man. She bent to speak into his ear and tore the flashlight from his grasp. The man straightened immediately. He turned to face the stage, visibly shaken.
Anna said something Jack couldn’t hear. She leaned closer, her ear to her daughter’s mouth. “I said, she must know a pretty scary poem!”
Dahlia gave Jack a wink as she passed and made the okay sign with both hands. She then took a spot behind the riser.
When the crowd saw Dahlia take her place, the Om got even louder. Children joined in, jumping up and down as they shouted “Om, om, om!” The beauty of the chant was gone. Now it was a demand. Jack wondered how long
this would go on before Dahlia addressed the congregation.
No, not a congregation, Jack thought. Cult is a better word.
Dahlia waved to someone and crooked her finger. Jack looked back to see Mrs. Bendham being ushered to the front by a large man. His sleeveless T-shirt displayed huge biceps the size of softballs. The old woman tottered up the side.
Dahlia gave an enthusiastic wave. That must have been a signal because, before Mrs. Bendham reached her, another man dressed in orange leather darted from behind a tent flap with a folding chair.
Dahlia shouted to Mrs. Bendham. “M’lady! You can’t sit on the grass. If you get down, you’ll never get back up off your ass! Sit by me. It will be easier for you to see the glory!”
A moment later the spotlights focused on the small stage and the bass player and drummer took their positions. The rolling Om suddenly ebbed. People who had been rocking back and forth stopped.
In the sudden quiet, Jack couldn’t decide. The crowd’s hunger was tangible, but what else did they share? Was that fear or awe?
The show was about to begin.
We need guidance but we get silence
If an apocalypse can be said to be good for anyone, the plague was good to Chris Evans. Chris lived in a town called Gas City and worked as an auditor for Grant County, Indiana. The County let him go as soon as it was obvious Sutr’s siege had begun. No one needed Chris Evans for his accounting expertise anymore.
However, Chris was a friendly guy. The Sheriff let him work beside one of his deputies, Peter Hawkins, to clear dead bodies. The work was hard, but as he lost weight, his hip and leg pain eased a bit, at least once he got a sweat going and kept moving. It was high school football that did the hip and knee in. Before the plague, a doctor told Chris he had arthritis and someday he’d need a hip replacement. But that was back when everyone had all the time in the world.
Chris was paid in food and water. Chris delivered water, too. Hauling big water bottles upstairs at the hospital and slinging bodies is where Chris Evans got his new muscle. Chris had gained forty pounds in two years as his hip pain worsened. In a matter of a few months away from his desk, he’d trimmed down and he looked years younger. The muscle wasn’t showy, but it was solid and his limp was less pronounced. At night, the pain in his hip made him grit his teeth and curse, but the weight loss had helped some and pain pills allowed a few hours of sleep eventually, once he waited out the insomnia.
His home town, Gas City, had been so named for its once plentiful reserves of natural gas. When that dried up, it became another small town calling itself a city on the way to ruin. When Sutr hit, it became a ghost town.
“Ghost town” was figurative, of course. Chris believed in math, not spirits. However, alone in his bed late at night, without lights or the comfort of other people, the floors creaked. The sounds that had terrified him as a little boy scared him anew.
“Water in the pipes,” his mother had told him of the far away hammering. “Just the house settling,” she said of the sound of footsteps on old floorboards at midnight. “Rats in the attic,” she said of the thick, scurrying feet.
Without lights, all the little boy fears returned to the man. Unseen, nocturnal animals trekked through Gas City. His right hip throbbed and his knee stung at night. Chris gazed out his windows, searching the darkness, his head swimmy with painkillers. He saw shadows dancing along the edges of his perception. Were those movements tricks of the eye? A cast of moon shadows? Something alive and hungry with a mouthful of jagged teeth?
Dead neighbors’ chimes trembled and sang disjointed songs of abandonment into a careless wind. In what his long-dead mother called “the witching hours," it was easier to believe a little less in math. Alone at night in a dead town, ghosts were easier to believe in.
After a week of insomnia giving way to a couple of hours of restless sleep, Chris abandoned his house. He filled a backpack with a few necessities and moved into Marion County Hospital.
“No use wasting time and gas on the commute,” he told Deputy Hawkins. But it was the loneliness, the unidentified sounds and the ghost parade that chased him from the little house in Gas City. Working with the Deputy gave him food, water, purpose and people to talk to who weren’t blue and gray and dead.
His new friends were the surviving hospital employees. Chris used a county truck to transport bodies from the hospital to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. When the cemetery filled up, Chris pushed the dead into the town’s incinerator.
“Whole families in the ground, in ashes or floating away in smoke,” Deputy Hawkins said. “It really puckers the bunghole.”
The only time Chris ever saw Hawkins take off his hat was when they burned the bodies. The tiny gesture of respect seemed a quaint leftover from a bygone era. Doff your hat at a funeral, sure. But for hundreds, thousands or millions of dead? The deputy’s grim habit seemed a microscopic acknowledgement of the horror all around them.
But the cemetery and the incinerator weren’t as bad as Chris expected. He could make peace with those places. Graves and burnt bodies were monuments to release and relief. It was the people who died slowly that “puckered his bunghole.”
The lucky ones fell asleep and never awoke. For most, to continue to live meant drowning slowly as their lungs filled with mucus. The coughing sounded torturous but, when that stopped, the gasping struggle for air began. Each raspy breath was a hitching pull through a narrow straw. The patients had to work so hard for each breath, the muscles between their ribs ached. The space between breaths dragged out until the next breath never arrived.
The hospital was empty of most of the staff, either because they died or they refused to come to work. Marion County General became a hospital without drugs or working equipment.
“County’s just a place to lie down now,” Chris said, “but the people are nice. Something like this? In my experience, it’s made everyone nicer. They’re people like me with nowhere else to go. We all help each other.”
That’s how the hospital became a shelter for the displaced. As the first wave’s lethality eased, widows, widowers and orphans began to arrive. The Sheriff kept the food and water coming by raiding the houses of the dead. They gathered together in hope of mutual support and safety.
That’s how the people of Marion, Indiana made it easy for the Alphas to corral the human herd for the slaughter.
From You Know Who
“Well, well, well! We have new people!” A high-pitched shout came from behind the stage. There was no applause at this greeting. The crowd went still and silent. A flap opened and a young, bald man in a ragged white coat appeared, both arms raised. He did not laugh. He cackled. “You know I love fresh blood!”
Anna whispered in her mother’s ear, “Advantage: Vampires. Virgin sacrifice to follow after the church picnic.”
An elderly man next to the stage pushed himself to his feet with the aid of a cane. “Are you in charge of this…this whatever it is?”
“I am not in charge of anything. That’s what God is for!” the young man replied.
“I didn’t get pulled over by God. We’re here against our will! You — ”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but perhaps after you find out whatever this is, you won’t be here against your will. I will be glad to explain. No one has to stay. But please allow me to make my invitation before you refuse it.”
The old man stood stiffly, unimpressed.
“Thank you for standing as I entered, my new friend, but that’s so old world and I don’t stand on formality. So please, rest your tired feet and all your questions will be answered. All your dreams will finally be fulfilled.”
A gaggle of people behind the old man gently pulled him down so he was once more seated in the grass.
The speaker’s last line seemed to be a practiced cue because two teenage boys appeared through the tent flap behind the stage. Between them they carried a desk. A young woman stepped in behind them carrying a chair. They placed the pr
ops swiftly and then rushed out of the way to the sides of the stage.
The man in white didn’t bother with the chair behind the desk and instead sat on the desktop, his legs crossed comfortably in full lotus position.
Anna leaned so she could speak into her mother’s ear. “Let’s decide right now,” she said. “If they force us to dress in unflattering saffron robes and sell flowers, we kill ourselves.”
“I wish I had that sense of humor. You got it from your father.”
“Get started with getting it. It’s the only thing that’s keeping me from shooting bananas out my ears,” Anna said.
The hot, white spotlight beam swung on them. The man on stage watched them, his black pupilless eyes glittering. “It’s time to bring the news,” he said. “I am Xavier!”
“X! X! X!” the crowd chanted.
He smiled and waved. “That’s right, friends. Always with the X, never pronounce the X like a Z! X is the unknown we solve for.”
“X! X! X!” they replied.
“For our guests and newfound friends, it’s time to tell the story again.” The crowd showed their approval with three slow claps and fell silent. The spotlight that had rested on Jack and Anna and the others near the front of the stage winked out, leaving Xavier alone in a white circle of light.
“Ladies and gentlemen, fools and slugs, boys and girls of all ages! I was in New York before the Fall of Man. What do you want to hear first? The good news or the bad news?”
“The bad news! The bad news! The bad news!”
“That’s the proper way because we always gotta end on hope!” Xavier nodded his approval. “First, in case you didn’t know, America’s enemies manufactured the Sutr-X virus to make us weak! Their goal was to weaken us. They put us down farther than they ever could when we were strong! I saw it happen in New York!”
“What happened?” someone said out of the darkness.
Xavier made a whistling sound and threw his arms wide and mimicked the sound of an explosion. “Zombie bomb!”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 55
