This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3

by Robert Chazz Chute

  Screaming incoherently, Carron emptied his pistol into the sky.

  Jaimie awoke.

  The trance was broken.

  The murmuration dispersed as the starlings turned West and fled.

  Francis Carron — not a soldier but a savage, not a warrior but a warlord — spread a terrible smile across his face. “I don’t believe in magic, boy.”

  “I don’t believe in magic, either,” Theo said. “But some magic becomes explainable by science if you wait long enough. And people? People like you? I don’t think we’ll ever be satisfied with any explanation of you.”

  Carron dropped the spent magazine to the road and reloaded as he turned his back to his men and regarded Jaimie. “You think a bit of show biz and angry birds will save you?”

  The boy still felt his father’s anger, feeding him energy, opening his throat from a thin straw to a pipe. “Like my father, I don’t believe in magic. Like my father, I believe in people. The murmuration wasn’t for you. It was for those who watch the skies.”

  And the signal was received.

  A new sound drifted to them. It began as a high note and slowly got louder and deeper. A thousand running feet. Screams. War cries. The Army of the Word came over the hill.

  “Sgt. Clangdon!” Carron called. “Get on that Leopard! Cut them down. They’ll scatter like birds, too. Walters, take these ones into custody.”

  Private Walters surveyed the onslaught pouring over the hill. “There’s too many of them, sir!”

  “We have hostages and superior firepower,” Carron replied. “We’ve already won. It’s all over but the shooting.”

  The soldiers ran to their positions, cursing as they watched the advance grow.

  Clangdon climbed into the tank turret behind the heavy machine gun. He pulled back the bolt. Clack-clack! He aimed down the barrel.

  Walters pinned Jaimie’s arms behind his back and zip-tied the boy’s wrists together. He shoved Jaimie to the ground and moved on to Jack with the zip-ties. The boy closed his eyes, but he could still see everything from above.

  “Brangdon!” Carron shouted.

  “Brangdell, sir,” the private corrected him.

  “Stand ready by the other tank with an RPG. When I give the word, fire it into the middle of them. That’ll give them some things to think about. We’ll crush them.”

  Brangdell paused a moment.

  “Hurry up, boy!” Carron said.

  The private eyed Carron’s pistol and then scrambled back behind the other tank. He picked up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and aimed at the center of the advance. Two more soldiers ran to the second tank and climbed in.

  “When we fire,” Carron yelled, “they’ll commence to start running back where they came from, as easy as a few shots scare birds away. When they run, start your engines, gentlemen! We’re gonna run them down like bad dogs.”

  The soldiers looked to one another nervously, but they nodded and stood their ground.

  “This far, and no farther, gentlemen!” Carron shouted.

  * * *

  Anna led the Army of the Word. Dahlia ran beside her, pistol out and held high. The masses carried rifles and shotguns and pitchforks and sticks. A few had nothing but rocks they’d picked up along the way. They ran screaming, strong and determined.

  Like the charge of the Light Brigade, Jaimie thought. It was one of his mother’s favorite poems: powerful and committed, valorous and doomed.

  Jaimie commanded his forces with a single thought that sucked the energy from their charge. The thought was so penetrating, everyone was sure they had heard it as a thunderous order from God Himself. It resonated over their hearts. The one word was, “Jericho.”

  The Army of the Word came to a halt, bewildered. The sound of weapons falling to the ground was all that could be heard. Some spiked spears into the dirt. Guns clattered to the pavement.

  Francis Carron laughed, wild-eyed in his delight. His laughter climbed to hysteria.

  The group stood, unsure what to do, until one young woman began to sing. It was Anna. She sang Amazing Grace, beautifully.

  Beatifically, Jaimie thought.

  Dahlia joined in. Then the rest of the Army of the Word added their voices.

  Carron’s laughter trailed off. “That’s…not a sweet sound.”

  Anna walked forward alone but Dahlia rushed to join her. Everyone else followed. The Army of the Word did not charge, nor did they march. They walked toward the roadblock, heads held high, singing.

  “Clangdon! Open fire on these pissants! Let ’em have it!”

  The redheaded sergeant stuttered. “B-but…they aren’t armed, sir!”

  The soldier’s gaze found Jaimie’s eyes and the boy mouthed one word: People.

  “You can stop this!” Jack yelled.

  Carron pointed his pistol at Clangdon. “Start shooting or we’ll be overrun! Shoot them or I’ll shoot you!”

  Clangdon gritted his teeth and gripped the machine gun. He turned it and aimed it at Francis Carron’s chest. “Mine’s bigger…sir.”

  “Walters!” Carron bellowed. “Shoot that traitor and get on that gun or we’re all dead! You are soldiers! Act like it!”

  But Walters put his RPG on the ground. “We are soldiers. And those are unarmed civilians. We are not monsters…sir. We are people.”

  Carron cursed, his face red.

  “I can’t take your forces from you.” Jaimie spoke, clear and strong. “But you can lose them if you lead where no one should follow.”

  The rest of the platoon laid their rifles at their feet. Clangdon kept his weapon trained on his commanding officer.

  With the choir behind her, still singing and swaying and holding hands, Anna walked past her mother. She stepped over her brother to stand before Carron. She smiled up at him. She held out her hand, palm up. “Surrender your weapon. Please.”

  Carron stared at her, numb. At the hands of the Spencers, he’d lost his command again. He glanced back. They weren’t his men anymore. They saw past the uniform. They saw him for what he was.

  Carron put the muzzle of his pistol to his temple.

  “Don’t do that,” Anna said. Her voice was soft, coaxing. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “But if I’m not…if I’m not in command, what am I?” A single tear slid down Carron’s cheek.

  “You’ll figure that out,” Anna said, “but suicide? That won’t save a wretch like you. You know suicide is not what you deserve.”

  Carron’s mind blanked. “No,” he said. “I don’t deserve that.”

  Anna!

  She ignored her father’s warning.

  Francis Carron hesitated, then placed the weapon gently into Anna’s hot, upturned palm.

  She nodded and smiled. “Now you’re doing the right thing. So am I.” Without hesitation, Anna placed the muzzle less than an inch from his right eye. Before Francis Carron could blink, she pulled the trigger and turned his brain to gray paste.

  The singing stopped.

  * * *

  As Carron crumpled to the ground, the Army of the Word discovered something new about The Way of Things. They had all received flashes of insight as the web of human consciousness tightened. But it was not the death of billions alone that had woven those frayed strands into a strong mesh. It was the death of Evil.

  Francis Carron’s death was the tipping point three plagues had built to. Both the innocent and the guilty had fallen to Sutr-X, Sutr-Z and Sutr-A. It was a terrible price to pay, but each mind is a node. With Carron’s death, the nodes of the Mindfield connected in a complete circuit. The human race was reborn to telepathy.

  Every human survivor of the plagues around the world awoke to this new power. All people stood as one. They stared at the sky as voices, information and emotion from everyone close by came to them. Some cried out, sure this was a sudden stab of schizophrenia to add to their terrors. But soon, they were reassured and a warm wave of calm
washed through the network.

  One voice that was really two, male and female, spoke one sentence: “The gap between what you were, and what you could be, is closed once more.”

  Pictures accompanied this message and the survivors understood at once. This mesh among humans had grown weak because it could not metabolize mankind’s growing violence.

  Rage and anguish and hatred? These emotions, married with terrible actions, separated whole and other. Fear separated people into us and them, friend and enemy. Compassion had been overwhelmed. War shut down the network, one mind at a time, until the knowledge of connection was lost.

  Long before recorded history, hunter gatherers began wars with farmers. Villages were set afire. Some groups of hunter gatherers turned into greedy, selfish marauders. The mental mesh loosened with each angry choice, broke with each act of violence and was lost to us all, good and bad alike.

  Now the connection was back and there could be no more lies among humans.

  Everywhere, people knew each other more intensely than they ever had. Sins were revealed and instantly forgiven because everyone understood weakness. Everyone understood failure. The new currency of human transaction was an understanding that reached deeper than speech.

  The survivors embraced each other. Over and over, a single thought was repeated amid tears and smiles. Every mistake, every wrong word and weakness, comes from people trying to do the best they can with what they have. In this, we are all One.

  Many had once thought telepathy would be the beginning of the end of mankind. How could we allow each other to live with errant thoughts bubbling up among us? How could we survive with our secrets known and every covetous or uncharitable thought brought to light? Instead, the survivors of the Purge discovered each person was a mirror, an equal, and worthy of compassion. No one was innocent and everyone shared the same vulnerabilities. They shared too many of the same thoughts to withhold forgiveness.

  Only one human was left out. Jaimie was plugged into the Nexus when the flood of psychic energy poured through the network. Everyone else connected two or a three minds at a time. Jaimie heard everyone on Earth at once.

  Theo came to his son’s side. “Jaimie? You’re not safe here. Go to the birch forest!”

  The boy’s headache was excruciating. He couldn’t hear his father’s voice above the cacophony banging through his aching skull. The flood of information was too much at once.

  “Why?” Jaimie asked.

  And he had his answer. He understood, instantly, because he had asked the right question at the right time. The Way of Things had fulfilled another part of Its plan.

  Jaimie and his family and Aasa and Aastha and Dayo and Sinjin-Smythe and Desi were all characters in a play, actors on a stage so vast, it included stars. Even Shiva was part of the script, playing her part and fulfilling her role in the plot, just as Jaimie had.

  Shiva, Jaimie realized, was simply doing the best she could with the role, and the brain, she’d been assigned. The Way of Things’ gigantic machine had created its crazy story. It was entertained. The purpose of evolutions and revolutions was not improvement. The goal was not enlightenment and nirvana, but entertaining chaos. The humans were united now, but only to make the coming conflict, and its potential for loss, all the more heightened.

  They’d gotten their gift back, but for how long? How often on this journey had defeat masqueraded as victory only to reveal itself in the last, pivotal moment? All that could rob the human race of its gift now was the last of the vampires and an army of slavering cannibals who didn’t know their own names. Even after three plagues and the deaths of billions, the game wasn’t over. There was still more to discover, more variables, permutations, combinations and insanity to provide amusement.

  The Way of Things was not yet sated.

  Jaimie blacked out.

  We are all monsters in some small way

  Jack walked down the rocky beach. Small stones crunched beneath her feet and she slid here and there. A howling wind, cold and bitter, whipped in from the Atlantic. The tide ebbed.

  Theo appeared beside her. “Jaimie’s sleeping on the boat and we have to go. It’s time to speak to Anna.”

  “She wants to be alone,” Jack said. “She’s still pretending she’s okay with shooting a man in the face today.”

  “She might think she wants to be alone, but she needs mothering more.”

  Jack crossed her arms and hugged herself against the wind. “Why don’t you speak to her, Theo? Why is it always me?”

  “She’ll hear it better coming from you. The soldiers are burning Carron’s body. I’m going to watch. I’ll give him our regards.”

  “Fitting.”

  “Go to Anna. You don’t want to because it’s goodbye, but you're cheating yourself of time with her.”

  Jack’s jaw tightened but she nodded. She made her way out to Anna, who sat at the end of the dock. A small, fast boat bobbed beside her. Dahlia, her pistol back in her gun belt, watched Jaimie sleep in the back of the boat.

  As Jack came up beside her daughter, she saw the boat’s hull was painted black and the flag off the back was neither Canadian nor American. It was the Jolly Roger.

  “Yo-ho-ho,” Anna said, reading her thoughts. “Just like Jaimie said, you’re getting a ride from a pirate.”

  Jack went up on tip toes to see her son. “Any change?”

  Dahlia leaned forward for a closer look at Jamie’s face and shook her head. “No rapid eye movement. He’s sleeping deep.”

  Jack’s stomach clenched when she thought of boarding the boat for Maine without her daughter.

  Anna read her thoughts and her lips trembled. “Dahlia’s boat looks fast, but it is shallow. I hope you don’t get seasick. Jamie says he can’t predict the future, but he’s…”

  Plugged in sometimes, Jack answered in thought.

  “This will take some getting used to,” Anna said. “How about we just talk?”

  “It is strange, isn’t it? I’m sorry I won’t be around to help you through...you know.” She gestured to Anna’s abdomen.

  “No arguments about me heading back West with Dahlia to find Trent?”

  “No. Even as you say the name, I can feel the warmth you have for him. The love. I didn’t understand that before. I guess Trent had some depths I didn’t appreciate. When you find him and this is all over, bring him to the farm so I can understand him better.”

  “If there is a farm. I’ve been sitting here trying to reach out to Papa Spence. I can’t find him.”

  “Proximity seems to make a huge difference,” Jack said. “It’s already flowing through the Army of the Word that making love among psychics…um…well, it kicks up the connection and quality by a factor of ten notches, so they say.”

  “Already?”

  “Post-victory celebrations.”

  “We haven’t won yet. There’s still the Alphas and the zombies. Advantage: vampires.”

  “Once our little general awakes, I think we’ll find out the plan.”

  “I should stay with you, Mom.”

  “No. We need you out of harm’s way. Besides, Trent is the father. When the baby’s born, he needs to be with you.”

  “But we’ve come so far — ”

  “Nobody comes so far they can’t go back. Once we get on that boat…well, you have your own family to build now.”

  “It doesn’t feel disloyal to you at all.” It was a statement, not a question. The connection of thoughts and understanding precluded confusions of Ought with Is. Anna knew Jack felt no abandonment or betrayal. Only a vestige of what she had been made Anna think she should feel guilty.

  “What if you get to the farm and Papa Spence didn’t make it? What if the vampires — ”

  “We’ll find out soon. Let’s not spoil the mystery by rushing to the last page.”

  Anna looked to the waves. “Last time I saw the Atlantic was when we visited Papa Spence that time. I hadn’t ev
en been kissed yet,” Anna said. “When things change, they change a lot. I wish Trent were here now. Then we’d all be together for the end.”

  Jack let that sit heavily between them. “You’re going to be busy with new beginnings. Maybe it’s best we aren’t all together. I could never stand Trent’s mother, telepathy or no.”

  Anna laughed. “I couldn’t stand her, either. But I love him. Trent was good for me. I wanted to spend all my time with him. Sometimes I wondered how such a great guy could come out of her.”

  “If everything…works…I hope you’ll come to the farm, even if you have to bring Trent’s mom.”

  They laughed together.

  “Anna…I’ve been a slow learner. I’m sorry. I never got to be my mother’s friend. No matter how old I got, if she was in the room, I was always twelve years old. I guess I’ve done that with you, too.”

  She began to cry and Anna put an arm around her. “It’s okay.”

  Jack took a deep breath. “I bet there is dulce around here somewhere,” Jack said.

  “Dulce? That seaweed you tried to make me eat?”

  “It’s a good source of iodine. Good for the baby.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s good for you both! Dry it in the sun. Take some for the trip. You’re less picky than you used to be about food. Maybe you’ll like it.”

  Anna gave a small smile. “I still have my druthers. It’s just that now I’m hungrier. Dahlia says there are lots of periwinkles around. The little Indian princess taught her about them. It will take a lot to feed us, but we could boil them.”

  “You do know periwinkles are like snails, right?”

  “I’ll pretend they’re fudge if it feeds us.”

  “You’re no little princess anymore, huh?”

  “I like ‘warrior-princess.’ Mom…if I’m going to go, tell me why you think things will work out okay.”

  “When I brought you home from the hospital, I was terrified. It’s different with your first child. They send you home with an infant and no license. You feel under qualified for the job. I kept you in a bassinet by the bed. I’d wake in the night and reach down to put my hand on your chest to make sure you were still breathing.”