Darting silhouettes emerged from the black bulks of two rotting whales. The figures flitted through the dying flames at their master’s command.
Crying, Misericordia threw his head back and spread his arms wide, anxious for death’s release, hoping for escape. The zombie dogs leapt and began to tear Adam Wiggins to pieces.
No matter how fast it may appear, Jaimie thought, Death makes a meal of us all. Death takes time.
* * *
Jack ran to her son, dodging past the wounded and the dead and the dying.
There weren’t many Sutr-Z victims left alive. Soon the last of them would bleed out and, in the coming light, the black rock beach would be stained red until high tide returned to begin cleansing the shore of chaos. The Sutr-Z infected had not retreated nor had they sought cover among rock crevices. Amid sputtering flames, blown open and cut apart by hot metal, the Army of Light would soon give its last gasp.
Jack stopped short when Jaimie turned to her. His eyes shone bright white. Behind him, in a feeding frenzy at the water’s edge, the zombie dogs tore and chewed at what was left of Misericordia’s corpse. One of the circle, a ghost-white mastiff, raised its head. In its jaws it held Wiggins’ shoulder blade. It growled at Jack.
Her knees went weak. A pack of wild dogs would be terrifying enough. Dogs can smell fear, but, unlike uninfected dogs, these animals could see her emotions, too. The evolving Sutr virus had, once again, improved on the original design, turning black and white vision into color. The zombie dogs were murder machines. Their brains worked below conscious thought, but she sensed their intentions as clearly as an alarm bell sounds.
Jack had always believed there was a master plan to life and death. She’d told Theo many times, “There had to be a reason for things, even bad things. Maybe especially bad things.”
Her husband had shaken his head, always the unbeliever.
She reached for Faith’s comfort now. There had to be a plot and a point to all this sacrifice. Genocide alone would mean there could be no God, but this virus changed and changed people, as it grew. A virus that improved people, made them stronger and stranger…there had to be a reason. She could hear the thoughts of others. These are gifts, she thought, even in the worst of times.
More dogs joined the mastiff, turning toward her, smelling her fear, watching and tasting the enticing yellow pervade her aura.
The pack growled louder and stepped closer, ready to leap for her throat and bring her down. In that moment, Jack couldn’t think of any reason good enough to attribute the plagues to a divine plan.
Jaimie whirled on the pack. The dream messenger, General of the Light and Bokor to the zombie army was now an Alpha, as well. Just as he’d ordered the pack to attack Misericordia, he commanded the zombie dogs now.
For a moment, Jack watched her son, but, as if in two worlds at once, she also witnessed what her son saw. The images came into her mind so fast and unbidden, she held her breath.
Even in moonlight, Jaimie’s vision was a bright, colorful kaleidoscope. He saw the pack’s auras, individually and as a group. He knew which dog was the leader, which was weakest and which was strongest. And the cold stars appeared so close and bright and…watchful.
The boy raised a hand and the colors shifted and mixed. The pack leader cowered. The growling mastiff turned its head and looked to the water.
“Meat,” Jaimie cast colors.
To the infected pack, Jaimie’s was a siren call, pulling them into another rampage. The red stabs of hunger pangs, the yellow fear of the victims, all the auras of their existence — blood and bone — invited the monsters to feed.
Zombies, bipedal and quadrupedal alike, have no understanding of lies. They followed their master’s command. The dogs ran for the water, intent on feeding. When they hit the cold ocean waves they kept going, paddling farther and farther out.
Jack trembled. “Jaimie?”
The boy didn’t speak. Instead, she heard his voice in her head again. Aasa? Purge the last.
One by one, each member of the pack was pulled down and disappeared beneath the waves.
There have always been monsters, Jaimie thought. We were always so removed from the monsters, by distance and by the powers of denial and neglect.
In moments, the last of the Sutr-Z virus invasion of America was erased by bigger monsters, more ancient and with replaceable teeth. The Atlantic took the very last of the Army of Light, as one force of nature swallowed the other.
Jack sent Aasa the warmth of a grateful smile.
The girl answered immediately: You’re welcome. Then the girl sent a mental message that, to Jack, made Aasa really sound like a kid for the first time since she’d met her.
They are scary, but Great White Sharks can be kind of cool.
* * *
Jack began to cry, but she was smiling, too. She gasped when she found it was Jaimie wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“Do you think life after death is just a dream, or is this life the dream? Maybe when we die, we awake to what’s real.” His white irises glowed with fierce intensity. “Maybe for us, life is a book and when this one is done, we’ll read another.”
Jack shuddered. “I don’t know anything anymore. This feels like a nightmare to me.”
“Less so, now.”
She nodded. “Thank you. Yes. And Jaimie? You…you have a lovely voice.”
He gestured toward his blazing eyes. “I want you to know, I always wanted to talk. I just…couldn’t. But Alphas talk too much. It’s like they were on powerful drugs…like I am. I found Misericordia so…loquacious.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“And now I am the last vampire,” Jaimie said. “Despite everything, I am still alone.”
“You were never alone! Your father and I…we’d wait forever for you. We didn’t say it enough because we always wanted more…more words…more clues to who you were underneath. But, Jaimie, every little flash of insight…every stupid Latin phrase we couldn’t quite follow…we love everything about you, even when you drove us crazy and we didn’t like you very much, we always loved you. Anna, me, your father…we love you so much. People say love all the time so it doesn’t have the force it should, but that doesn’t mean we never meant it. You know that, right?”
Jaimie squeezed his mother’s shoulders so tightly, another pound of pressure would have hurt her. “After I die, will I be allowed to go back to the Last Cafe? Will I see Dad again?”
He watched confusion sift through her aura. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t know is an honest answer. It’s a good answer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m done with stories. I should go before I get too hungry.”
Jack grabbed her son. “There’s so much more to say and to know.”
He looked deeply into her eyes and pulled her to him. “This is all there is.”
His embrace lasted only a moment. He kissed her forehead and broke away. “Goodbye, Mother.”
Jaimie turned toward the water.
“No! Wait! Don’t go! Stop! You aren’t alone! Make me like you! Make me like you!”
Jaimie shook his head. A tear slipped down his cheek. “I have to break the cycle. Cycles and circles, circles and ellipses. Cycles are circles. All circles are ellipses but not all ellipses are circles…and we go round and round, a circus on a merry go ’round oval, a misery go ’round orbit. Maybe the answer will be reincarnation, do you think? Could that be it? Maybe obituaries don’t matter? Big Bang after Big Bang, an endless loop of infinite permutations and combinations? One day, The Way of Things will have read Its last book. He? It? She? Perhaps She will finally experience every probability and potentiality and eventuality. Dark Matter will be done with us. The reader will close the book and turn off the light on the celestial night stand, pull the covers up and fall into a dreamless sleep and we won’t exist anymore.”
“Jaimie, I don’t….” Jack shook her head, confused. He’d lost her and Jaimie was as opaque to
her now as when he was mute for months at a time. She squeezed his hand and that seemed to calm him.
“But the reincarnation loop is a trap. I don’t want to come back. If I did rise from the dead and return here? I don’t want to be a zombie or a vampire. If I had to do this all again, I’d spend my days worrying the words and meanings less. I’d spend more time studying people, trying to understand them. I’d want to be a human, but a different one. I wish I’d been the son who could say ‘I love you’ without choking on the words.
“You told me many times, but I can only tell you once and forever, Mom. I love you.”
Then the soft visions slipped into Jack’s mind. Jaimie showed her the life after death he hoped for.
* * *
The words and pictures came, a river of images whose strong current pulled her into The Last Cafe. She stood by the languid lagoon beneath the waterfall. She smelled the green of the bamboo forest. Jack watched two boys in the distance leaping from an impossibly high mountain of sawdust, laughing.
And she saw Theo again. Her Theo. He waited by the cozy fire in the library, reading the book that told him she was thinking of him.
This was her chance to do what she couldn’t do properly before. The book told her husband she missed him. He read her thoughts through the words on the page. He knew she hoped to see him again. She thanked him for sharing life’s joys and struggles equally.
By the heat of the wood stove, Theo glanced up from the book in his hands. Jack stood before him in that wondrous, snowbound library, watching.
Theo smiled, eyes bright and alive once more.
And Jack awoke, returned to the rocky shores of Poeticule Bay. The smell of burnt meat still hung in the air.
“No more stories. I have to go find out what’s real.”
Jack wept…and nodded. “Even if it was just a dream, it was a beautiful one. Thank you for that gift, son.”
Jaimie smiled. “Dream a dream — verb and noun the same.” He shook his head. “There should be a different word for each thing…but life’s not like that. Maybe it’s the Alpha virus, but I’m okay with that now. Dream is a word that tastes smooth and sweet. It has allure.”
Allure. A lure. Allure. A lure. He smiled. Well, that finally makes sense.
* * *
Beneath the waves, perhaps The Last Cafe waited beyond an eternal birch forest. Perhaps what came next was nothing everlasting.
Jaimie had no fear of some dark realm of punishment, foretold in ancient visions and prophecies. Walking into the ocean, the boy left hell behind.
He closed his eyes as the cold closed over his head and walked off the cliff. He hoped that, when he opened his eyes, his father would be standing amongst shining white trees. If it was the perfection he hoped for, Theo wouldn’t have to say anything. He’d laugh and Jaimie would join him.
As the cold flooded his lungs. Jaimie knew his struggle would be brief. In drowning, the fight was fleeting and the oxygen deprivation would usher in welcome euphoria.
If he awoke, he’d truly know The Way of Things. Finally, father and son would have the meaning they’d sought. In the final moment of Jaimie Spencer’s life, his curiosity was greater than his fear. He turned the page, hoping for an epilogue to this plague of days.
This was a love story between Father and Son.
The exit door closed behind Jaimie Spencer, so this cannot truly be his epilogue. It is ours.
* * *
Jack tore her gaze from her son and walked away, hoping he’d change his mind but knowing he would not. Head down, she made her way back across the black rocks and tidal pools amid charred and shattered bodies.
Aasa waited by the lighthouse, arm held high, carrying a light. Dayo stood nearby, behind little Aastha. The women nodded to each other.
“You okay?” Dayo asked.
Jack tried for a brave face and failed. She hugged herself tight. “Pickle,” she said. And wept.
* * *
Desi Walsh arrived at dawn. He managed to get out the words, “Late to the party,” before Dayo ran at him and squeezed him tight and kissed him hard.
Then she slapped him. Hard. “Aasa said you were coming, but you took your damn time!”
“Jaysus, deadly you are!” He held his red cheek and feigned pain. “I had to heal.”
“From what?”
“I told Aasa not to tell you. An Alpha messed me up pretty good. Looked like the official Grim Reaper, he did. It was insane. I collapsed in the back of the truck we were supposed to escape in.”
Dayo covered his mouth with her fingers. “Sh. Aasa told us about Brother Bob and Dr. Sinjin-Smythe. It’s terrible. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Dayo’s eyes narrowed. “What else?”
“We spent a long night on a roof, before we sprung the trap. Alphas all around, we were worried they’d smell the fear in our pee.” He smiled.
“Had a heart to heart with Bro Bob. Before we met him, he was very sick. Diverticulitis, he said, and then cancer. He’d told us he was at a couple of retreats. It wasn’t a Zen monastery, though. Not exactly. It was a hospice. He was dying when Sutr came. Everybody died around him instead.”
“Cancer? What kind?” Cliff Spencer asked.
“The worst kind, but he got better. That made more sense when I was lying there, all messed up. After the building came down on the vampire tribe...it was bad. Bones broken through and through. I’m completely better now. In fact,” he hugged Dayo tight, “I’m feeling quite fit!”
“Everybody will be better from now on,” Aasa said. “It’s the deal.”
All eyes turned to Aasa Vermer.
“The Way of Things. Jaimie made a deal with It.”
“Oh? What would Jaimie have to bargain with?” Cliff asked.
“Everyone between here and New York,” Aasa said. “Wilmington, Vermont got it especially bad.”
“I don’t understand,” Cliff said.
Aasa sighed. “Jaimie cooperated. The Way of Things got all its death and destruction. It got Its crazy stories. In return, we won’t get sick anymore. We were getting better at healing, anyway, but the deal makes it permanent. No more cancers or plagues or bad brains. The Way of Things won’t do it again. It’s the rainbow promise.”
Jack turned to Cliff, catching a flash from his mind. “You’ve been terrified of illness since your mother died. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
Cliff gave a warm smile.
“Yeah!” little Aastha said, reading Desi’s mind. “It’s like Noah and the ark after the flood and all that bullshit!”
Everyone chuckled, still trying to absorb what this new information meant for them.
Cliff paled. “I’m a doctor but…I guess I could learn carpentry. Some of it is the same skill set. Wow…I mean…no more disease? Immortality?”
“A kind of immortality,” Aasa corrected him. “We’ll all die of old age eventually, but we’ll go in our sleep. Everything breaks. We could still fall off a cliff on our heads or starve to death, but the suffering is pretty much over. Death can’t go away completely. Gotta make room. But no more illness.”
Jack forced a smile. “Throw out your pathology book, Cliff.”
“Why would The Way of Things make that bet?” Dayo asked. “If It’s addicted to conflict and stories —”
Aasa shook her head. “The Way of Things didn’t say.”
“I suspect I know why,” Dayo said. “We weren’t supposed to win.”
The group went quiet. Even their thoughts were empty for a moment and all that passed between them was a blank, gray feeling of disappointment.
“It’s just my own little chaos theory,” Dayo said. “But there would have been more sex and violence if Misericordia had won the war. We got the gift of gab just to give us a small chance, to make the outcome less sure and more interesting.”
Everyone mulled the thought of God betting against them.
“Maybe it wasn’t really God at all,” Jack
suggested.
“If The Way of Things isn’t really God,” Desi said, “I dearly wish the real deal had shown up to help us out early on.”
“We’re here,” Jack said, “so maybe He did.”
Dayo frowned. “God wrote a book packed with death and destruction. He’s not above it.”
“So…we won and the war’s over.” Cliff said.
“I think the war,” Desi said, “will be to stay on track. We lost our way. Whether we were meant to win or lose, this turned out to be quite the course correction. As I lay in the back of that truck in Charleston, I was so banged up I was afraid I’d die and scared I’d live. Then I heard the voice. ‘“The gap between what you were, and what you could be, is closed once more.’ It’s a second chance, isn’t it? I began to heal and I…no one was near me. I heard no other voices…no human voices…but in that moment…I guess you’d call it grace. I felt grace.”
Everyone nodded, but no one felt like celebrating.
* * *
As the first fingers of dawn reached West, Jack sat on a flat rock by the lighthouse watching the Atlantic. Aasa sat on her right, Aastha on her left.
Soon, twin suns met on the orange horizon, one low in the sky, the other reflected amid the waves and whitecaps.
“There’s always another war,” Jack said finally. “Every day is a war.”
“What war?” Aastha asked.
“Today. Today is the future. Like it or not, we’re all in it. I almost ran into the water with him last night.”
Aastha reached out and gripped Jack’s hand.
Jack gave a grateful smile. “The three most powerful words are: I love you. I’m so glad Jaimie and I could say those magic words to each other before…” She cleared her throat. “The two most powerful words are: begin again. That’s what we’ll do. That’s the war now, with every dawn.”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 93
