It was mid-afternoon when they stopped at a clearing. Considering the debris, it was clear many others had camped in this same spot. Black ashes stood at the center of a circle of earth pounded flat.
There was still a lot of light left in the day. Jack wanted to put more miles behind them, but her shoulders ached and her skin was red and raw under the heavy pack’s straps.
Jack had once thought she was in decent condition, but half an hour a day working out on an elliptical trainer hadn’t prepared her for marathon walking. She noticed Anna’s face was thinner, too. Her daughter’s cheekbones stood high and her jaw had become a hard, defiant line that emphasized the girl’s beauty.
Jack thought she would get stronger as the days on the road dragged on, but without rest and fresh food, her muscles were breaking down.
Theo had been quiet today. As she searched for bandits in the woods and Carron on the road, Theo’s nagging whisper told her to try to stay calm. She wanted to scream that she was calm, but screaming would subvert the message and scare the kids.
Away from Anna and Jaimie while gathering firewood, Jack whispered to Theo, “If you’re going to talk, tell me something more useful. Like, how much longer are we going to be stuck in this obstacle course? How long before we can drive on to Maine? Without the road blocked, we’d have made it to your father’s farm in one long drive.”
Then Theo did contribute something useful. His words were urgent. “We’ll never make it this way. You’re carrying too much.”
Jack had packed and repacked their supplies as bare as she dared, but the numbness in her fingers and the throbbing in her shoulders told her she had to lighten the packs further.
“We’ve got to cut the weight, Jack. You are people, not packhorses.”
“I know! I know!”
Her sudden vehemence startled Anna. Her daughter looked at her strangely as she brought the wood. “I found some birch. It’ll burn just like paper. Good kindling.”
“Thanks, honey.”
“You okay, Mom?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Anna looked at her mother hard. “Right. Everything’s peachy.”
* * *
“Tomorrow we’ll leave the tent behind. It’s a winter tent. It’s too heavy and hot, anyway. We’ll leave it here for someone else to use. It’s cold at night, but not so cold. It’s almost summer, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah. Well…summer in Canada,” Anna said. “I wish we’d gone South. Texas is toasty.”
“We’ll make do with the tarp.”
“Fine,” Anna said, “just the tarp. Brave choice considering you haven’t slept outdoors since camping in your parents’ backyard.”
Jack’s flare of anger dissipated when she saw Anna’s teasing smile.
“We’ll do fine without the tent. We only need the tarp for a windbreak or if it rains. It’s pretty chilly tonight, but it’s getting warmer. I’ll carry the tarp tomorrow, Mom.”
“I need to make some more concessions to reality,” Jack said. “We have to lighten our packs more or we we’ll never make it to Papa’s farm.”
Theo appeared at Jaimie’s shoulder. He spoke in the boy’s ear, alternately urging and soothing. After a few minutes, the boy nodded and dug to the bottom of his pack.
Jaimie walked to the center of the circle and gently, reverently, placed his big dictionary on top of the pile of black ashes. From A to zyxomma (a type of dragonfly found in India), the big dictionary would make good fire starter.
Anna spotted it first. “Ears!”
“You little bugger!”Jack cried. “I took that out days ago and gave you more tins of food to make up the weight! I had no idea you put that big, honkin’ dictionary back in! Do you know how much it weighs?”
Jaimie tore out some pages himself, readying a fire. Jack studied her son’s face for a hint of emotion but he seemed as remote from her as the moon. Even now, he was a blank slate.
She tried to draw him out. “Sneaky! You put it back after I took it out.” She took a breath, held it and then let it out in a long, slow exhale. “Thank you, Jaimie,” she said finally.
“Yes. Thanks, Ears,” Anna said. “Giving up your dictionary is like asking a toddler to burn his teddy bear.”
Jaimie turned to the woods to gather more branches for the campfire. A tear slipped down his cheek. Giving up his big dictionary was another milestone, another monument to loss. However, Theo told him not to let his mother and sister see his grief.
* * *
The big cans of stew were heaviest so they ate those first. Jack did not bother rationing them. “Eat all you want tonight. We can’t carry it all and we aren’t taking in enough calories for the long walk.”
“What about tomorrow?” Anna asked.
“New policy,” Jack said. “We will worry about tomorrow, but not until tomorrow. We’ve been rationing too much. We can’t starve and carry packs all day, too. We have to get beyond this traffic jam fast. I’m sorry. I thought by carrying too much…heh. I guess I was trying to play it safe, but this isn’t the time to play it safe. We’re on the run.
“We’ll scavenge things more and carry less. We’ve got to make ourselves more mobile and I’ve weighed us down far too much. We’ll make more miles tomorrow.”
“We’re going to have to dig into the cars, aren’t we?” Anna said. “We’ll have to deal with the dead.”
“If it comes to it, we’ll eat bark from the trees. There’s plenty to eat under rocks if we decide we’re hungry enough.”
If Anna noticed the tremble in her mother’s voice, she did not remark upon it. “It’s okay, Mom. We’ll adapt.” Her lips thinned to a hard line of resolve.
“That’s how the first cave people figured out oysters and lobsters were edible, right?” Jack asked. “The first guy to try snails must have been starving. They were pretty gross, but later we fried them up and called them escargot. And restaurants did not sell them cheap. If small and slimy can become a delicacy — ”
Anna shrugged. “I was thinking more of the surgeons and medical examiners and funeral directors.”
“How do you mean?”
“Before the plague, every hour of every day, some doctor was sawing into somebody’s hip, calm as a serial killer. Slaughterhouse workers electrocuted and boiled and cut into animals, sometimes while the animals were still screaming. Embalmers opened up bodies smashed in car wrecks to find veins to pump corpses full of chemicals.”
“Um…and?”
“We never thought about it. It’s just what we did to keep the ball rolling. What we have to do now, poking through the possessions of the infected?” Anna looked at Jack sombrely. “They’re rotting and they smell terrible and we’ll have to be careful we don’t get typhus or something.” She took a deep breath and let it out, hissing through her teeth. “My point is, how much worse is that than all we took for granted? It’s not so different, and we’re doing it to survive. People did lots of awful things for money behind closed doors. They could have chosen to work in a florist’s shop but instead they took saws to meat and dealt with terrible things every day.”
“You’re saying we could be worse off.”
“We’ve had it easy. A few months ago, my worst problem was the wi-fi cutting out or having a fight with my boyfriend. That stuff feels like the firstiest of First World problems now, huh? I wish Trent were here now so I could have a fight with him. A little non-problem would be refreshing.”
“Our little girl is a warrior at heart,” Theo said.
Jack stared at her daughter. “Where is the little girl who, just a short while ago, insisted I kill spiders in her room for her?”
“She died when the house exploded, Mom, but if it’ll help, you can still kill spiders for me.”
Jack put on a brave smile. “Soon, we’ll get beyond this jammed highway. We’ll find a luxury sedan. We should break into a Lexus dealership. We’ll arrive in the Corners in style and Papa Spe
nce will roast us a goat.” She didn’t sound as confident as her daughter, but Anna’s strength bolstered her.
* * *
Jaimie watched his mother’s egg-shaped energy field change from fear and sadness to anger. Anger was part of ambition. It made his mother stronger. He hadn’t understood that before.
Theo squeezed his son’s hand. Jaimie closed his eyes, tired and bored of this walk that seemed to never end.
“You did the right thing, Jaimie. You already memorized most of that dictionary, anyway. When you let go of things, even things you love sometimes, you make room for more good things. It will be okay.”
Jaimie heard no fear in his father’s voice. He hadn’t heard fear from Theo since the night their home exploded. Perhaps he was beyond fear.
Jack said little, but his mother’s mind was always busy, reliving their last night at home. Jaimie watched the play and replay of her emotions from that night, so strong he could predict their distinct pattern.
Theo did not stop speaking about Papa Spence’s farm, their getaway, and the Gateway. Getaway and Gateway…a simple transposition of vowels, but a very different meaning.
Jaimie’s head was heavy and he knew, having eaten a full meal, he would soon fall into sleep. Then The Way of Things would take over. The Army of Light would need direction to stay on course. He’d have to search for more recruits to the Army of the Word.
Keeping the Sutr-Z infected where he needed them, until they were needed, was a troubling problem. The zombies needed constant overseeing. Stumbling away from the nuclear ruin of New York, the zombie army was growing, attacking humans along the way, always feeding.
The Way of Things said the horrors of all that human sacrifice was necessary for the war ahead. Jaimie wondered how many of the European refugees would have to die to serve a greater good in a future he could not foresee or understand. As he commanded his Sutr-Z forces to march to Maine, every new recruit to the zombie horde was another death for which Jaimie felt responsible.
If I could just be the messenger, Dad, I could endure with that.
“You heard Anna,” Theo answered. “We’ll all do what we must. Your job is no different. You’re running the slaughterhouse, son.”
I don’t want to!
“I know. Your distaste for the task is how you know you’re still one of the good guys.”
Jaimie thought of how his sister’s lips thinned when she spoke of foraging among the rotting dead. Her jawline became hard and she stuck out her chin as she spoke of the grim tasks ahead.
If Anna could raid rotting corpses, he could find more recruits for the Army of the Word.
“Carpe Noctem,” Jaimie whispered. Seize the night.
Explosions, implosions, and tricks of sight
Vermont was an open carry state and, since the plagues began, it seemed everyone’s favorite Amendment was the second one. Don Tate Sr., formerly Wilmington’s zoning officer, became the town’s new mayor after the big Sutr-X die-off.
In his old job, he’d issued construction permits. With the town’s officials sick or dead, Tate achieved his life’s ambition: running municipal politics, or, at least, the shambles of what was left after the pandemic.
His first act as mayor was to make open carry mandatory in town. “If everybody’s packing a firearm on their hip,” Tate was fond of saying, “the tourists stay civil.”
But no tourists came to Wilmington anymore. Just outside of town, by a barricade of dead cars, bodies dangled and rotted at the end of bright, yellow nylon ropes. The dead served as both signs and symptoms, a warning to strangers and symptoms of a town that had seceded from compassion.
The town’s small police department was gone due to the Sutr Flu. Mayor Tate had taken over the role of law enforcement. The first stranger he caught within town limits was an African American drifter from Connecticut named Arnold Pellam. A former software engineer, Pellam didn’t run when Tate pulled up to the old Swanson house in the town’s police car. Pellam didn’t run because he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Jim and Shannon Swanson were an elderly couple among the first to fall to Sutr-X. Pellam had slipped into town unnoticed and had chopped wood for the couple’s wood stove. Jim was feeling poorly and asked the young man to stay on and take care of their vegetable garden.
Soon after, when Jim died, Shannon invited the young man to stay. When Shannon couldn’t seem to stop coughing, Arnold Pellam became her caregiver. He held her hand as she died of Sutr-X. Pellam buried Jim and Shannon next to each other, deep under their abandoned tomato garden.
“Seemed a shame to waste that nice house. Shannon said I could stay as long as I liked,” Pellam told Tate. “They had no kids, so they left it to me. Good people.”
Don Tate smiled. “Well, no problem then, as long as you have at least one piece of paper to prove your claim.”
Of course, Pellam did not have such a piece of paper. Don Tate Sr. smiled wider.
The Mayor planned to hang Pellam, but the remaining town council objected.
Many of the town’s survivors protested the execution. The townspeople held a candlelight vigil outside the town’s jail. “We are not barbarians!” they chanted.
“We live in barbaric times!” Don Tate screamed at the protesters. “Kill one as a warning and you won’t have to deal with marauders coming in from all over and picking us dry! Wake up, you stupid, stupid people!”
On the morning Arnold Pellam was to be executed by hanging, Don Tate discovered that someone had let the prisoner out of his cell. He didn’t know who had allowed Pellam to escape. As the protesters continued their angry chant, apparently unaware that the prisoner had escaped, the mayor paced and cursed.
Finally, Tate stalked out to address the crowd gathered around the newly constructed gallows.
“Friends,” Tate told the protesters, “I have prayed in the church of sober second thought. I’ve considered all your concerns and, last night in the wee hours, I set the prisoner free. Arnold Pellam is in the wind. I let him go on the understanding that we have all the people we can manage here on short resources. If I ever see him again, I will shoot him. If you see him, I expect the same of you. I still think the course I had set was the right way to go, for all our protection. However, perhaps lynching a black fella on the edge of town would send the wrong message about who we are.”
Though grumbling permeated the assembled, a core bunch of hardliners gave Tate cautious applause at this compromise.
The next morning, the dawn revealed a young family — father, mother and two girls no older than thirteen — hanging from the branches of two oaks on the edge of town. Each victim, unknown in town, had been shot between the eyes before being strung up for all to see. Their family van had Massachusetts plates.
News traveled fast among Wilmington’s survivors. A whisper campaign grew until a group of angry townspeople lit torches and headed to the town hall that night.
They called for Don Tate to come out and face them. He did so, preceded by his son. Don Tate Junior, stood off to the side, his big Redhawk pistol pulled free of its holster in the middle of his chest. Junior watched the group, teeth gritted.
“Any of them makes a move, Junior,” Don Tate called out, “shoot the balls off ’em.”
A woman’s voice came from the back of the crowd, booing.
“And any lady makes a move, shoot them through the guts. Anybody who stands against me is a threat to town security. I will not tolerate threats to our security.”
To howls of outrage, Don Tate calmly surveyed the crowd, his hand on the butt of the six-gun at his hip.
“I don’t know what you people are complaining about,” he said. “We needed a warning to bandits and looters that we are not to be messed with. You wanted me to spare Arnold Pellam and so I did. And those strangers, you’ll notice, are white. You know, just so’s we don’t send the wrong message.”
A middle-aged woman cried out in fury from the rear and pushed f
orward as the crowd parted. Junior held his weapon out in front of him with both hands, taking aim.
Helen Stevens had been the Wilmington town hall custodian since she’d returned from the first war in the Persian Gulf. She stumped forward. The roll and kick of her stride betrayed that one of her legs was artificial. She was never seen without her Purple Heart on her breast pocket since coming back to live in the town where she’d grown up.
The woman pinned Tate with her gaze. “I haven’t seen shit like this since doing my time in the sandbox!”
Stevens reached to her neck and withdrew the thick, silver chain that held the master key to all the town’s facilities, including the police department’s office. “You didn’t let that poor man go! I let Pellam out!”
Mayor Don Tate drew his old Colt and shot Helen Stevens between the eyes.
“Any more of you pansy-assed liberals wanna dose?”
No one moved. “Good. Then I guess we all know who not to mess with now, don’t we?”
Junior looked disappointed he didn’t get to shoot anyone. The crowd, shocked and cowed, walked backwards, eyeing the Tates. Father and son shook with excitement, eager for an excuse to shoot again.
“You did good, son,” Don told Junior when the last of Wilmington’s townspeople dispersed.
“What if they come back with rifles or they try to pick us off through the front window of the house?”
“I’ll post a deputy while we sleep, Junior, but, to tell the truth, I doubt we’re in any danger from that crew. They’re nice folks in peacetime, but they’re sheeple when things get serious. Make an example of one sheep and the rest of the herd will stay in line. Sutr didn’t hit us as hard as some towns so a lot of our people took in friends and family before I got to be in charge. We have a lot of people here and we have to make the food and gas last.”
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