When the baby came, Kelly gave birth at home. The hospitals weren’t considered safe for childbirth by then. A neighbor woman helped Brad deliver the child, a little girl the Dicksons named Susan. After the baby was born, Brad took up any slack. He helped with the baby without a grumble, rising above Kelly’s expectations in every way.
Then the first wave of the Sutr-X virus hit New York deeper and harder. Quarantines and looting began. Brad’s abilities shone even brighter. He was strong. He knew guns. When the looters came to steal from the Dicksons, he drove the gang away with a bullet between the eyes of the first thief who made it through their barricaded door.
“Count the days,” Brad said. “On the other side of this thing, we’ll say we spent 100, or maybe 200 days, in hell. Then everything will get back to okay and someday we’ll bore our grandchildren with stories about the big, bad flu. Someday, all this will feel as remote as the trials and horrors of pioneer days. I swear.”
Brad told Kelly that he’d thrown the looter’s corpse in the street as a warning to anyone else who would threaten his family. His voice was steady and calm and so matter of fact, he scared her a little. Later, she heard him crying in the night as he rocked the baby.
It was the first time she’d ever heard Brad cry. When he did that, she was filled with confidence that the plague hadn’t driven him mad. Despite throwing a corpse into Nostrand Avenue, her husband was still one of the good guys. Kelly was so sure then that they’d make it through the Sutr pandemic.
Then the baby began coughing. The Sutr Flu took tiny Susan Dickson on a Thursday night as a rainstorm poured and pounded.
Brad withdrew and stayed in the nursery with the baby. He wouldn’t come out and Kelly couldn’t force herself to come in. The smell of baby powder, the softness of Susan’s flannel sheets and the small, too-quiet room set off more crying jags. Kelly stayed in her bed.
Kelly knew she could stop counting the days now. The calendar would never matter again. There would be no first steps or first day at school or someday grandchildren. With the baby dead and gone (gone where?), no matter how soft and warm the weather, every day would feel like the rainy Thursday night Susan died.
Kelly slept and hoped it was all really a nightmare born of maternal fears compounded by a failing world. Her baby’s cry did not wake her. A full day had passed. When she went to the door, she could hear the rocker’s creak on the old hardwood floor. Brad still held Susan, rocking gently and muttering to the child, but the baby would never awake.
“There are flowers called baby’s breath,” Kelly told Brad from the nursery door. “Until now, I never thought how morbid that sounds. Something that dies right after you get it shouldn’t be called baby’s breath.”
“It’s time,” he said. “We can’t keep her here any longer.”
That was all Brad said. When Susan died, it was as if the baby had taken part of Brad with her, leaving Kelly and her guide dog alone with the ghost of what might have been.
* * *
Kelly and Brad made their way to the nearest church to bury Susan.
Even as he dug their daughter’s tiny grave, between Kelly’s sobs and moans, Brad began a gravelly cough that would not ease. With the exertion of digging, his hacking coughs came thicker and faster. “Kell…I’m sorry. I think I’m gonna have to dig a bigger hole.”
“You are leaving me alone.”
“Just…” Brad broke into another coughing fit. “I thought I could fight it, Kell. I really did. I’ve had the fever for a few days. I didn’t want to tell you.”
“You’ve been hiding it from me.”
“I’m afraid…when I went out to find food…I’m afraid I brought it back with me. Sutr got me, but I killed Susan.” He wept, then spit something out. Then Kelly listened as Brad threw up and wretched.
“Give me the shovel,” she said. “I can dig.”
“I’ll hold her,” Brad said. “When it’s bedtime, could you please tuck us in together? I’ll keep her safe. Susan and I will hide under the covers.”
Batman whined, snuffled and nuzzled Kelly’s hand, looking for reassurance. Maybe the guide dog somehow sensed the horrors still on the way. Kelly had no reassurance to offer. She wept as she dug.
Brad coughed a long time, each breath wheezing into the next, shorter and shallower as the day cooled to night.
Heedless of nightfall, Kelly knew darkness. She kept digging, making comfortable room for two.
Brad struggled to breathe and spat thick liquid obstructions into the growing pile of dirt beside him. His fever spiked into hallucinations and Brad began to talk to his dead baby about fields bathed in sunshine.
“Do you see that, Susie?” Brad asked, his thoughts floating in at a languid pace. “Elysium fields…white circles in the sky…bullshit harps and wings of false promises…the end of trying. Susie, I don’t wanna try no more…I’m tired, baby. I’m really…really…bone tired.”
And Brad stopped trying. His arms went slack and he almost dropped the baby. He lay down and covered Susan in loose dirt until only her cherubic face was exposed to the world.
Later, Brad stopped breathing.
Kelly was angry when she’d found what he’d done with the baby. She wept and wailed as she pushed him into the open grave.
When she was ready to say goodbye to them both, she placed the baby carefully in her husband’s arms for the last time. She picked up the shovel and tucked Brad and Susan in for their longest night.
* * *
Blind since birth, Kelly navigated well on those rare occasions she ventured outside for some fresh air. However, she’d always been a poor swimmer. Kelly considered throwing herself into Prospect Park Lake or the Paerdegat Basin, but neither choice was close enough to walk. With grief’s storm still raging, she would have killed herself, but she couldn’t leave Batman. Abandonment would be too cruel to her faithful guide dog.
Kelly had stopped eating. It wasn’t a hunger strike of protest or a cry for justice from an uncaring universe. She didn’t really plan to die of starvation. Surely God wouldn’t punish her for suicide, she reasoned. She simply had no appetite.
Instead of eating, Kelly spent her days remembering the feeling of kissing the soft pillows of her baby’s cheeks. She missed Brad’s stubbled chin against her palm. God and Batman couldn’t blame her if she could not bring herself to eat.
Kelly waited for her storm to stop raging. It did not withdraw in the days ahead. Whenever she thought of Susan’s last breath...baby’s breath…the rain of tears returned. Her headaches pulsed with bad magic. Thursday night rain pounded Kelly Dickson into weakness.
By the time Sutr-X had churned into the Sutr-Z variant and the infected from Europe swarmed through the city, Kelly was ready to die. She was sitting in her living room when one of the infected found her. If she hadn’t worn her headphones, perhaps she would have heard the screams of the Sutr-Z zombies, and their victims, running through the streets.
A warning would have done Kelly no good, though. One moment she was listening to Brahms’ Lullaby on a battery-powered recorder.
Then, a crash.
Next, a rumbling growl.
Kelly stood, arms out, asking who was there and hoping to ward off the intruder. She reached for her white cane and slashed it left and right before her, cutting the air. She cried out as someone bit into her forearm.
Her dog barked. She felt Batman’s body brush past her as the dog attacked her assailant. Batman saved her, for a short time.
Soon after, Kelly got her appetite back. Brad and Susan? Forgotten. What replaced her baby and husband was ravenous hunger. In fact, Kelly Dickson forgot everything. Even her own name became a mystery within moments of that terrible bite below her elbow. The fever hit her like a hot spotlight inches from her head.
Soon, the infected woman who had once been Kelly Dickson — wife, mother and teacher — was eating Batman’s guts.
Then she saw a flash of light. She’d ne
ver seen a flash of light. It was so bright, the burn seared her forehead. If she could reason, she might have figured out the burns on her skin were thin bars because, before the Venetian blinds caught fire, the nuclear flash shot between the slats.
Her blindness had been nearly complete before the detonation. Had she been able to see before the sky shattered and the ground shook, the flash would have blinded her.
She woke to a hot wind breathing across her skin. There were a few other survivors. Though sounds were muffled and her body went numb, Kelly could still hear. There was shuffling and moaning. Something heavy and hard lay on top of her. She couldn’t push it off her chest, but after a few minutes of struggling, she found she could wriggle out from under the wreckage.
As soon as she stood, she followed the gathering crowd shambling past. Her hunger guided her through the debris field that had once been Brooklyn. Her first instinct was to lunge at whomever was nearby, jaws snapping. However, she smelled open sores and burns and sickness. Whoever it was, they were like her. She felt no hunger when she turned toward her fellow travelers. They were too damaged to eat. She stumbled forward, drawn by an unknown force.
Then the zombie who had been Kelly Dickson saw something clearly for the first time in her life. The image invaded her mind. It was a teenaged boy, but an angel, too. He floated in the air and beckoned to her. His wings were made of fire. He was young, but he represented something ancient, too. He was Bokor, that which commanded her kind.
Somehow, no matter how brightly he burned, the flames did not consume him. He said one thing, imprinting the message on what was left of Kelly Dickson’s mind: “The meat is this way.”
The ragged parade of the Sutr-Z infected emerged from the rubble of post-nuclear New York, following the bright beacon hovering in the sky. Meat and the final battle and the answer to “gone where?” All answers waited in the North.
* * *
The boy watched. All his life, he’d sought meaning in the small spaces between words and the vast distances among people. As the infected stumbled his way, Jaimie Spencer reached for the comfort of a Latin proverb. He chanted it as if it were a hopeful, magical incantation: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
Fortunate is one who understands the causes of things.
As Danger pulls up from the depths
The nose of the Spencer’s van stuck in the mud. Its rear wheels hung two feet off the ground. It looked like an arrow that had fallen far short of its target. A shiver went through Jack and her stomach fluttered a warning with lead-winged butterflies. There was no getting out of the ditch. The engine wouldn’t even stir. It had been a long, cramped and circuitous drive, but the family’s van was their last piece of home. Now they had to abandon that, too.
Jack cursed herself. She'd insisted on driving even though she was exhausted. When the offer to switch was made, she had stubbornly insisted she felt fine and that her family could sleep. Supermom would get them through this. Jack had been trying to spare them.
“Have a nap and when you wake up we’ll be much much closer.” And you’ll eat less, too, she thought.
Jack had driven since the night before. Anna wanted to speak about Mrs. Bendham as they pushed through the darkness. Jack stayed silent, neither nodding nor shaking her head, until Anna eventually lapsed into silence. Jack, fresh with the fear of having a rifle pointed at her head, concentrated on the road and put as many miles as she could between her family and Lieutenant Francis Carron.
When a wall of hard rain drummed loudly on the van’s roof, Jack gritted her teeth, determined to continue through the storm. After a few minutes she had a headache from the noise. It was as if she sat beneath a snare drum.
She rolled her window down halfway to take in fresh air and get cold water on her face. That had helped for a time, but as the miles wore on the windshield wipers grew monotonous and hypnotic. She fought the urge to close her eyes and finally she had grown impatient, desperate to get to Poeticule Bay, Maine faster. She sped up instead of exercising caution.
When the gray body of the tractor trailer loomed up to block the breadth of the highway, she swerved and stood on the brakes. The road was slick.
They ran over a motorcycle lying on its side and the rear end of the van slid sideways to glance off a small car. Though Jack had tried to avoid these obstacles, both car and motorcycle saved the Spencers from crashing straight into the truck. Their seat belts pinned them in for the jolt as they dug into the ground and the airbags deployed.
The rain had softened the embankment. The accident could have been much worse.
But there are no accidents, Jack thought. There's only stupid.
Her thumbs ached from the small explosion of the airbag. At impact, the airbag had broken her tight grip on the wheel. After she made sure she hadn’t killed anyone, Jack thrust her hands into cold ditchwater to bring down the pain. Still, each joint in her hand ached with an unforgiving throb.
Cursing, Anna darted forward, exploring the traffic jam beyond the eighteen wheeler.
“Anna?” Jack called.
“I’m here! I'm here…I'm here!”
The tactic was meant to reassure her mother of her safety. Instead, hearing her daughter's voice getting smaller and quieter made Jack afraid.
When she hadn’t heard her daughter for more than a few moments she began screaming for Anna to come back.
Anna soon appeared, breathless. “What’s the matter?”
“Besides running us into a ditch? Nothing,” Jack said.
“Why were you screaming?”
“I was calling,” Jack replied. “Worried about you. You hadn’t said anything for a couple of minutes.”
Anna cocked her head at her mother. “I was trying to climb on a roof and get a better look.”
“And?”
“Jammed as far as I can see.”
Theo walked beside Jaimie as the boy collected firewood. He placed a small pile of sticks and branches at the mouth of the tractor trailer’s rear doors. Someone had already opened the truck’s cargo box. Broken boxes of stereo systems and plasma TVs littered the landscape. It appeared someone had begun to take the cargo away and then thought better of it.
Jack looked at her watch and found that it was broken. Anna’s iPod had run out of juice and she’d forgotten to take a charger for the van. The gray sky made the exact time hard to estimate. They knew it was late afternoon, but that was all.
The rain eased but the wood was wet and the wind was fierce. Jack shivered. She thought they could stay in the van if they could struggle into their seat belts, but the angle was too steep for comfort. The effort made her think of astronauts sleeping in zero gravity, strapped in with their arms floating around. Her hands were icy and so stiff she was reluctant to try to move them. She didn’t relish the night ahead.
Jack struggled out of the ditch and climbed the embankment. She found Jaimie pushing a big cardboard box along the asphalt, his back braced on the box and pushing with his feet. She was about to call to him when she saw what he’d been up to. One of the jackknifed truck’s trailer doors lay flat on the ground. The other door hung closed. Her son arranged the cargo boxes in the open space to build a windbreak.
“Outstanding, Jaimie! Thank you! We’ve got tonight’s shelter.” Jaimie did not look her way to acknowledge her and Jack's smile slowly dropped away.
Anna came back with some grass to start a fire.
“Did you — ?”
“Don’t look at me,” Anna said. “I didn’t tell him to do it.”
“It was me,” Theo said, sitting stiffly on a box marked: TV stand. “I give Jaimie lots of good ideas. You don’t think he listens much, but he’s always listening.”
The truck was nearly full so they didn’t have to move much to make a small space for themselves. The truck smelled of wet cardboard and plastic, industrial smells that would probably never make a comeback.
Anna suggested making a bed out of th
e Styrofoam packing. The truck's metal box was now their cold floor. The packing material was warmer on their backs.
Jack tried to get a fire started but the wood and grasses were too wet. They passed two tins of cold soup back and forth and made their tiny nest as darkness crept over them.
The Spencers spoke little as they arranged the packing material around them. They changed into dry clothes and huddled close together in their sleeping bags from the van. Jack propped up her son’s head and slid a bar of white Styrofoam beneath it.
Another storm arrived to march over them. As all light leaked away, unrelenting rain pounded the truck’s metal body, loud and insistent.
“Before all this,” Anna said, “there were people who would think this was some kind of adventure.” Her laughter was a bitter crack.
Jack’s last thought before she allowed herself to collapse into unconsciousness was that she hadn’t gone to sleep this early since she was a very young child. Jack had driven her mother crazy, begging to be allowed to stay up late and defying her curfew with books read under bedcovers, the words illuminated with a flashlight. It seemed the future was all about flashlights and, perhaps soon, candlelight.
Jack woke from the same bad dream several times through the night. Theo was telling her to run and run faster. “Trouble’s coming, Sweetheart! He’s chasing us again and we’re late for an appointment!”
Francis Carron. The big man ran at them, coming faster and faster, while they ran in slow motion, as if caught in an underwater mire. At the end of the nightmare, she watched Carron shoot her husband, again and again.
On the East coast, somewhere near Papa Spence’s farm, someone else — no. Something. Malevolent and armored, it waited for them on a rocky shore.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 60
