And now the Sutr-X war had arrived in rural Vermont.
“Gimme the keys, man,” Ed said. “We’re scouts. We’ve scouted. Let’s get back to your dad and report.”
“No way! We should get a closer look. What are we going to do? Run back like a couple of scared little kids and tell them zombies are headed our way?”
Ed looked confused. “W-why not? That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
“You’re being a wart, man. How many of them are there? Are these really the zombies or are they vampires? Will a bullet to the skull kill them? Or would a sucking chest wound do the job? Use your head. Dad will want information.”
“What do you want to do?”
Junior Tate smiled. “This is what we’ve been waiting for, dude! What have we got? Very few available honeys to choose from and inbred kids planting cabbages for us for the rest of our lives. But those — ” Junior pointed, “are The Walking Dead. And I’m Rick.”
“What about me?”
“You can be the goofy dork the Governor ends up shooting in the head. Or the farmer’s daughter.”
Ed sighed. “Don’t be a dick, Junior. Couldn’t they just be the Army of the Darkness or something? And we could be the guy with the chainsaw for an arm?”
“Bruce Campbell? There’s only one Bruce Campbell. Besides, we can’t both be the guy with the chainsaw — ”
“Then we’ll be the brothers from Supernatural.”
“Cool car. Now you’re thinking.”
“I am thinking,” Ed said. “I’m thinking we should jump in your truck and get out of here and head to town. Fast.”
“And when we do, do you think they’ll let us do any shooting? No. They’ll put us at the back like they did last time and the time before that. I didn't get to shoot one marauder. I haven't got to shoot anybody yet.”
Ed looked down the road. He didn’t need the binoculars anymore. He could see the dishevelled nun clearly. “I was never so anxious about getting to shoot bandits, anyway. That was all you.”
Junior shrugged. “Those don’t look like bandits, or people, neither. To me, those look like targets and I’m going to get a few bull’s eyes before we go back to camp. We need to test the invading force. Remember when we saw Red Dawn?”
“That was a movie, man.”
“Look around, Ed. This is a movie!”
“I hope, for us, it’s the right kind of movie.”
It wasn’t.
Every day is discontent
Genevieve and Fern led Anna to the edge of the circle to look for more branches. “Don’t worry about my brother,” Anna said. “He doesn’t say much but when he does, it only sort of makes sense. Jaimie’s special.”
“Special?” Genevieve and Fern looked back toward the campfire.
“Don’t be afraid. Jaimie’s kind of…laconic. He got it from our Dad,” Anna added.
“What is laconic?” Genevieve asked.
“It’s a ten-dollar word that describes your sister, too,” Anna said. “It means your sister and my brother generally shut up.”
Genevieve burst into giggles, quickly stifled when Fern spoke in a surprisingly deep voice. “Sois sage.” Fern searched her sister’s eyes. “Sois sage.”
Genevieve gently took her sister’s hand and spoke in French in hushed tones. Fern nodded and returned to the fire to rearrange everyone’s sleeping bags. When she was done, the foot of each sleeping bag pointed toward the small campfire.
“Good idea,” Jack said with an air of joviality which rang false. “Our feet will be warm so the rest of us will be warm.”
“No. Your feet will be warm and the rest will be cold,” Genevieve called. “But this way, each person gets a little bit of the heat and will sleep deeper.” She looked at Jaimie. “The deeper we sleep, down below the dreaming, the better.”
Jack watched Fern's face. She wished Theo had more to say about these strange girls. She needed counsel on how to deal with them. She wished Theo spoke to her much more than he did.
* * *
“To sleep deep and safe, the most important thing,” Genevieve told Anna, “is to get some spruce branches and put much soft stuff under you. It’s the ground that sucks all your energy away along with your body heat. Without something more between you and the dirt, you wake up feeling old.”
Fern returned to Anna and Genevieve to help find more boughs. She took hold of a thin pine branch and began worrying it back and forth and pulling it free.
Surveying the Spencer family’s faces, Genevieve softened her tone. “The fire’s fine for tonight, but it’s smarter to use insulation and just build a fire only when you need to, like when the rain soaks you.”
“The fire’s nice, though,” Anna said.
Genevieve didn’t look at Anna. She smiled and said, “You’ll toughen up.”
Anna reddened and returned to searching for leaves, moss and deadfall. Not taking the hint that Anna was offended, the French girls followed her. Fern snapped small boughs from nearby coniferous trees. Genevieve held a flashlight for Anna so she could cut thicker pine branches free with her pocketknife.
“What’s even better is if you put some on top, too. If you do it right, with a blanket first so you don’t get itchy, you can keep the rain out and stay hidden.”
Anna couldn’t see Genevieve’s face, so she followed the flashlight beam to a blue spruce.
“Sometimes, when we were too tired to go deeper into the forest, people have walked right by us,” Genevieve said.
“Thanks for the advice,” Anna said. “We’re not exactly Captain Camper and her intrepid pathfinders.”
“Our ancestors were voyageurs,” Genevieve said.
“Who?”
“You know,” Genevieve said. “Explorers and traders. For the Hudson’s Bay Company. They opened the fur trade and brought everything from big ships on tiny canoes. And on their backs, too.”
“Oh,” Anna said. "I'm from Missouri. Until recently, we moved stuff with huge Kenworths."
The French girls did not laugh at her joke. “She doesn't know anything,” Fern said.
“Fern! Sh!”
“Never said I did,” Anna replied, irritated.
“Tell us about the boy,” Fern said.
“He’s my brother, that’s all. Like I said, he doesn’t talk much.”
The sisters exchanged a look Anna could not interpret and they spoke in fast French which defied her introduction to the language in high school. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Gen-fer. That’s kind of rude.”
“Sorry,” Genevieve said. But she did not translate the conversation.
All three girls hauled the boughs back to camp in silence. They stayed quiet once they had all zipped into their sleeping bags.
Genevieve rolled on her side and spoke softly to Anna. “Okay, two things. When you shit in the woods, it’s a lot easier if you sit over a log. If you can’t find a log, at least hold on to something and put a couple of rocks under your heels. It makes it easier. Also, take off one pant leg so your clothing is out of your way. You can’t just throw your jeans in the washer and dryer out here.”
“Um, thanks for all the free advice. What’s the other thing?” Anna asked, not really wanting to know.
“Your brother. Has he told you what’s waiting in the East?”
“I told you, Jaimie hardly talks at all.”
“He’s talked to us in our sleep.”
“What?”
“We recognized him.”
“You saw him in the dark, you mean?”
Genevieve made an exasperated sound. “Without the fire on his back. The…the wings of fire.”
Anna let the silence stretch out. She had no idea what to say to that. Finally, she asked gently, “How long have you two been out here and what things did the bad people want from you?”
“A long time and they were bad men. You can guess the rest,” Genevieve said.
�
�I’m sorry.”
When Genevieve spoke again, it was a barely audible whisper. “You aren’t bad. So why is he letting you go East?”
Anna yawned. “That’s where the hope is.”
Genevieve went quiet for so long it seemed she’d fallen asleep. Then, “Your brother told us to stay away from the East. He's worried about us. If he is worried about us, why isn’t he worried about you?”
Anna still didn’t know what to say.
“He really hasn’t told you anything?”
“If my brother told me stuff, I’d remember it. Especially if he talked about dead people walking day and night. I’d want to know more about that. That sounds…” She searched for a word besides crazy and landed on “interesting.”
“They all think they’ll be fed. It’s like they’re on the way to salvation, following your brother. At night, he’s the beacon, leading them to food. He’s the fire in the sky. Hunger is all the infected know. They’re biting people along the way, to keep up their strength, but also to make more of themselves. When you get where you’re going, there might be hundreds, even thousands of them. Your brother showed us so we’d stay away. You won’t want to be there when it happens.”
“When what happens?”
“The war. Your brother told me to warn you. We’ve been waiting here for two days. Waiting for you.”
“Speak plain. Tell me — ”
“Jaimie said, ‘Tell my sister not to go all the way.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“He said to tell you, ‘Don’t go to the farm in the Corners and don’t go near Poeticule Bay.’”
Anna went quiet, reviewing their conversation. Had her mother told the sisters the name of their destination? She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think so.
“Something will happen, but he doesn’t know the details. If you go too far to the Southeast, you will die, Anna.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not supposed to tell anyone.”
“Not even my mother?”
“Especially not your mother. She has to go all the way to the end.”
“This is crazy.”
“Your brother said you’d believe me if I told you a special word.”
“What?”
“I feel silly saying it but…he said, tell Anna I said, ‘Pickle.’”
Anna wanted to laugh, but the fear that accompanied the urge was like a weight in her belly.
When crazy starts to make sense, she thought, I might be crazy, too.
“‘Pickle’ is what he says when he puts on a seatbelt. It was kind of an inside joke, family code. I confused ‘pickle’ with ‘buckle’ when I was a little kid and…I…uh…you’ve talked with my brother more than I have. Jesus! What else did he say?”
“He said the baby’s coming and you have to make preparations to defend yourself. That’s all.”
“You’re sure he didn’t say anything else?”
“Fern and I got the feeling he has many places to be each night.”
“My brother is Santa Claus.”
“He’s an angel with wings of fire. When he comes to you in your sleep…he is…what’s the word?”
“Weird? Insane? Unbelievable?”
“Awe. Fern and I felt awe. And it’s terrifying, too. It’s even scarier when you wake up and you find your sister had the same nightmare. He showed us the dead, the ones walking North from New York. New York’s on fire. I saw it.”
“Why wouldn’t he just tell me all this himself?”
“You wouldn’t have believed. He said something in Latin that meant, No one is the messiah in his own country.”
“Okay,” Anna said. But it wasn’t okay. She felt like her head was full. Genevieve could tell her nothing more.
Anna's last words to Genevieve were, "About the…about all of it…don't tell my mom."
It was a long time before Anna finally escaped into sleep. She had hoped to meet her brother in her dreams. She wanted to speak with him desperately. But Anna's was a black sleep, empty of dreams.
It felt like the future.
Wondering what the clues might have meant
“Wait for it…wait for it…” Junior Tate laughed as he shot the snarling nun in the head from less than three feet away. She crumpled to the ground. Ed stomped on the accelerator. Tires squealing, the pickup roared away, just ahead of the Sutr-Zs.
Junior’s maniacal laughter turned to screams as the sudden movement almost threw him out of the pickup truck’s bed. At the last moment, he banged his knees on the tailgate hard.
“Ow!” The pain made him cringe, but he hooked enough of the tailgate to keep from tumbling into the road. “Ed! You genital wart!”
Another of the infected, a boy of perhaps thirteen with a savage burn across his face and one broken, useless arm, ran and lunged at Junior with snapping teeth. Junior pulled back just in time to avoid the boy’s jaws closing on his neck.
“Easy, Ed! Take it easy!” Junior hollered back through the cab’s open rear window. Stay ahead of them, but keep ’em close. Is that so hard? That kid tried to give me a hickey!”
“What do you want from me, man?” Ed pulled farther ahead, glanced in the rearview mirror and fought the impulse to push the accelerator through the floor.
“I wanna see them up close and personal! Give them an interview!” Junior called back. “That’s what I want! Go a little slower!”
“You’re crazy!”
Junior shot the kid in the chest and he went down. The zombies paid no attention and ran over the boy’s body. Some tripped. Many more trampled the kid's remains into the asphalt. The horde focused only on Junior.
“Ed, you have it all wrong. We’re kings. We’ve got a lifetime supply of new trucks and I can say for sure that a C in algebra does not matter anymore!”
An athletic looking young woman in a sports bra and lycra shorts appeared out of the crowd and ran alongside the pickup. Her long red hair jounced in an unraveling ponytail.
“We got a looker here, Ed!” At least, Junior thought so until the woman turned her head. A chunk of her scalp was missing, revealing loose, stray meat flaps from multiple bites. She grabbed the pickup’s fender and tried to swing up, into the truck bed.
Junior stomped on the woman’s hands with his heavy workbooks. He heard a crunch as he broke two fingers, but the infected woman only winced. All he saw in her eyes was hunger.
Junior shot her in the thigh. She went down, but not for long. She rolled and bounded up again. Her leg didn’t work well, but she dragged the limb behind her as she limped forward, determined. She hardly took her gaze from Junior’s face for a moment. Her stare was a challenge, the way staring into a wolf’s eyes is a test of dominance.
“They’re an angry bunch, Ed!”
“No shit? Why would that be, I wonder?”
“Shooting them in the heart seems to work as well as shooting them in the head.”
“So The Walking Dead comics got it half right?”
“Nothing wrong with The Walking Dead. I love that shit! These things have the same feel for pain that those zombies did!”
“How do you mean?”
“They don’t seem to feel much.”
“Maybe they feel it later, like, after a workout?”
Junior laughed and told Ed to slow the truck again, but Ed shook his head. “We’ve scouted enough. Let’s lay rubber and get back to town!”
“Do that and I’ll make sure you get night guard duty for a year straight. This is our chance, man! After these things are all shot, you and I will get the chore of burying or burning them. Then what? This is the adventure, dude! After this part is over, you may as well have been an accountant like your dad. That’s as much excitement as your stupid life can expect. Do you really want to be like your dad, counting rations and supplies with a clipboard all day and listening to the ham radio every night? Is that all you want? You wanna be a wart for the rest of your useless life? This is your ch
ance to finally do something. A chance like this won’t come again. How about it, wart boy?”
“No,” Ed Bruce replied through gritted teeth. “That’s not all I want.”
Ciphering where all the Latin went
Genevieve and Fern were gone when the Spencers awoke. Anna let out a shriek when she discovered her backpack was missing and Jaimie wasn’t in his sleeping bag.
Jack flew to her pack, pulling at the leather straps with shaking hands, screaming for her son. Panicky, she lifted the big cookie tin out of her pack and hefted it, feeling its weight and holding it tight to her chest.
Jack looked up to spot her son step out of the trees and into the clearing.
“Everyone calm down. It’s okay,” Theo said. “I’m here. Jaimie’s here, too.”
Jaimie had watched the girls steal the pack and tip-toe out of camp before dawn. Some scent or whisper caught in the rising wind remained after they left.
He liked Fern. She was quiet. She’d left him a gift before she followed Genevieve into the woods.
Jack slumped. “I worry about those girls.”
“I worry about us,” Theo whispered to her gently. “The girls will be fine. Well, whatever passes for fine now.”
“You okay, kid?” Jack asked Anna.
Anna shrugged. “They got my favorite sweatshirt. I’ll miss that for a while, but I guess I don’t need to carry it all the way to Maine just because it’s cute. It’s not as warm as the sweater I’m wearing.” She sighed. “Genevieve was right. I guess I’ll toughen up.”
Jack took her daughter in her arms. Not long ago, any sort of setback would have left Anna in a wailing, crying fit. Now she seemed to stand taller.
Anna smiled. “Are you going to throw a hissy about the food they stole?”
“No. I hate spicy ginger chicken anyway.”
“I’m proud of you for making the mature choice,” Anna said.
“Is that how I sound to you?” Jack asked.
“Condescending? Yes. All the time.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.”
Jaimie made a sleepy grunt and crawled back into his sleeping bag.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 71
