The Green Dawn de-1

by Mark Justice

  Soon enough, they found out what the obstruction was in the road.

  Traf?c. Cars at a complete standstill. Several people walked around on the highway, which indicated to Jubal that this long line of cars wasn’t going to move anytime soon.

  Up about a hundred yards, alongside the highway, was a large silver tent that looked like a prop from a science?ction movie.

  Then Jubal noticed the armed soldiers in HAZMAT gear. Some stood at attention while others herded citizens back into their vehicles at gunpoint. Several more stood around the silver tent.

  Far ahead, the vehicles were being rerouted over to the southbound lanes. That explained the southbound-only traf?c on the way up here.

  A gunshot cracked. Jubal?inched. Fiona squealed. Jubal could not see where the shot came from.

  “Stay here with Ma. I’ll be right back.”

  As Jubal slammed the car door shut, two armed soldiers approached him. He could not see their faces behind their protective masks, but the weapons were menacing enough.

  “Get back in your vehicle, of?cer. All vehicles are restricted beyond this point.”

  Jubal was afraid they were going to say that. He stood his ground.

  “But I have to get up to Carlsbad on of?cial police business.”

  “You have no jurisdiction here, sir. Please turn your vehicle around and go back. It’s for your own good.”

  Jubal felt his face?ush and knew if he had a mirror with which to see his re?ection, it would be beet red. He pointed back at the cruiser.

  “We have a deathly ill woman in that car that needs to get to the hospital now, or she’ll die. Do you hear me, soldier?”

  The soldiers turned their heads toward each other as if conversing in a silent language.

  “If you’d just clear a path…” Jubal said.

  “We are going to have to take a look at this sick person,” one of the soldiers said.

  Jubal stepped aside, hoping the soldiers would see his mother’s condition and let them through. He walked behind them as they circled the car. As he passed Fiona’s window, he noticed she pulled up her shirt collar.

  One soldier swung the back door open while the other stood away.

  “You see,” Jubal said, “She’s…”

  “We have a corpse here. Everyone stand back while we remove it from the car.”

  The soldier farthest from the door approached to help his partner. Jubal stepped in front of him, risking harm and not caring one fucking bit, and bent to his mother. He placed two?ngers against her neck, momentarily unconcerned about the damned blisters or boils or whatever they were on her neck.

  His mother was dead.

  A heavy hand landed on Jubal’s shoulder. “Move away from the car, of?cer. We must quarantine the body.”

  Quarantine?

  Jubal stood in shock as the two soldiers walked past him, carrying his mother between them towards the silver tent at the side of the highway. Fiona stared at him through the window with tears running down her cheeks.

  Jubal sprinted after the two soldiers, who still hadn’t reached the quarantine tent yet.

  Three other soldiers, who had been policing the nearby area, saw him and ran over, blocking his path.

  “I want to see my mother,” Jubal said, hand falling instinctively to his Glock.

  Three barrels lifted, pointing straight at him.

  “Throw that gun down, of?cer, or we will shoot to kill. This is not a threat; it’s a fact.”

  Jubal reluctantly drew his Glock with two?ngers and?ung it toward the soldiers. One of them swooped his hand down, scooped it up and stuck it in his belt.

  From the direction of the quarantine tent, a shot rang out.

  Jubal lunged at the men blocking him, attempting to break their line, but they expertly grabbed his arms and pulled him to the ground.

  “No! They shot her. They shot my mother! Let…me…go!”

  The three men held Jubal on the ground while he continued to struggle. One planted his knee in Jubal’s chest, cutting off his breath.

  Jubal looked up into the soldiers’ blank helmeted faces, looking for sympathy or mercy, but all he saw was his own re?ection. A man in agony and despair.

  “Mister,” said a soldier. “You have two choices: go back home or die.”

  Jubal stopped struggling.

  Suddenly Fiona was there. “Please, leave him alone. We’ll go back. Just let him up.”

  The soldier who had his knee on Jubal’s chest rose. “You better hope so, ma’am. We don’t have time to fuck around here.”

  The men released Jubal, who stood up, brushing off the backs of his legs. He suddenly felt very empty and tired.

  “How bad is it?” Fiona asked the soldiers. “What’s happening in Carlsbad?”

  “Ma’am,” a soldier said. “Carlsbad is dead.”

  Under the careful watch of the soldiers, Jubal shuf?ed back to the cruiser like a man defeated, with Fiona in tow.

  Fiona placed her hand gently on Jubal’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off. When his mother had died, something within himself had died along with her. And now the government had her corpse, probably keeping it for dissection instead of a proper funeral. And how would he ever retrieve her body for burial?

  The world had gone mad and it seemed civilization was fucked.

  He allowed Fiona to lead him back to the cruiser. She took him to the passenger side of the car, and said, “Keys.” He didn’t question her. He handed over the key ring, then slumped into the passenger seat.

  The gunshot still echoed in his mind.

  They shot his mother. They said she was dead and they shot her anyway.

  You know why.

  No. He didn’t want that disturbing picture in his head.

  They shot her because she was becoming one of them.

  “No,” Jubal whispered.

  The dead army.

  Fiona looked his way, but didn’t speak. He knew she wanted to?nd a way to comfort him, as he had tried to do for her after Renee Spencer died. That moment seemed to have happened months ago. Fiona turned the car around and headed back toward Serenity.

  Maybe she couldn’t?nd the words; she was likely still in shock herself.

  Jubal closed his eyes and tried to think of a time-was it just a day ago? — when the sky wasn’t green and corpses didn’t rise from the dead. Instead, a series of images?ashed through his thoughts.

  His mother comforts him after he started a?ght with the tall girl who lived next door and received a busted nose for his trouble. She tries to look concerned, yet every now and then a smile slips through.

  His mother sits up all night next to his bed when he shivers with a fever, frequently pressing a cold washcloth against his forehead and murmuring silent prayers; he isn’t scared but, rather, comforted by her presence.

  His mother, dead only a few minutes, stands up and tears through the HAZMAT suit of the soldier nearest her and chews through the man’s stomach. When she stands up her entire face is covered with blood and small pieces of?esh and muscle. Rivers of scarlet?ow down into her empty, cold eyes.

  “Stop the car! Pull over!”

  Fiona stomped on the brake pedal, forcing Jubal to throw up a hand to brace against the dashboard. “What?”

  Before the car was completely stopped, Jubal was out the door and throwing up on the blacktop. He fell to his knees; it felt like his body tried to eject everything he had eaten since he was twelve. When he was?nally?nished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and climbed to his feet, wincing at the new soreness in his stomach.

  Fiona was standing next to the car, her arms folded across her chest. She studied him with a look of exhausted concern.

  She hugged him close and helped him into the car again.

  When they were about a mile farther down the road, she said, “Would it help to talk?”

  “No,” he said. But in less than a minute, he blurted out, “My ma…they shot her. She was turning into one of those things.” Ju
bal felt the hot tears?ll his eyes. He turned away from her and stared out the car window, blinking until he felt like he wasn’t going to cry.

  Fiona placed a hand on his arm.

  “I loved her, too,” she said.

  He put his own hand over hers. In the midst of this madness at least something good remained in his life. “I know,” he said.

  She released his arm.

  “Fee?” he said. “When we were kids, why did you punch me in the nose?”

  He turned to her in time to see the faint smile play across her face. “You called me Stork Girl.”

  He remembered. Jubal had been a smart ass when he was a kid. He had deserved that punch in the nose.

  “You always were a tough broad,” he said.

  “You bet your ass.”

  Jubal sighed. “I have to do something pretty tough now and I could really use your help.”

  She took his hand. “We’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

  Damon Ortega had been the second most important man in Jubal’s life. He’d tried to be a good role model for the boy, had taken him?shing, made sure he kept up his studies. Damon had even been the one-at the request of Jubal’s mother-to give the boy “the talk.” Jubal and Damon still laughed about that one, about how the older man’s face quickly reddened and stayed that way when he learned the depth of the boy’s knowledge.

  “You can really do that?” Damon had asked.

  Repeating that line never failed to make the sheriff blush all over again.

  There were so many good memories, and some that weren’t so pleasant. Like when Damon crawled into the tequila bottle for a few months after his wife left him. That dark episode culminated in an ugly night at Conchita’s when a drunken Sheriff Ortega pulled out his service revolver and shouted incoherent threats at a-thankfully-small group of townspeople. Pops and Red had talked him down, taken the gun away from him and then poured a gallon of coffee into him before driving him home. The next morning Damon emptied every bottle in his house into the kitchen sink.

  There was no investigation, no charges?led. Everyone knew Damon and the pain he was in. For his part, Damon recognized his second chance and took it. The people of Serenity took care of their own like they usually did. It was one of the reasons Jubal never wished to live anywhere else.

  Now he had to make another unpleasant memory.

  When they rolled up Damon’s driveway, Fiona said, “You need a minute?”

  “No.” And it was true. Jubal had somehow managed to lock away his emotions so he could focus on what had to be done. Later he might turn into a quivering mess, but for now he had managed to achieve a bit of distance from today’s events.

  As long you don’t count sweaty palms, a dry mouth and a stomach so messed up that it might explode out the back of your pants any second.

  He climbed out of the cruiser and walked back to the trunk. Locked into a brace on the inside wall was a Mossberg. 12 gauge shotgun. Jubal removed it and checked the load. He pumped a round into the chamber and shut the trunk.

  Fiona was waiting for him by the front of the car.

  “I know it won’t do any good to ask you to stay out here,” he said.

  She stared at him.

  “So I won’t. But this could take a while, Fee. If he hasn’t…you know…”

  “You think I’m going to let you go through something like this by yourself?”

  He forced a smile. “Come on, Stork Girl.”

  They walked to the porch and through the front door. Jubal didn’t hesitate. With the shotgun raised, he walked quickly to the living room.

  Damon wasn’t in the room. The couch was a mess. The cushions and the pillow were speckled with blood. Jubal remembered the coughing?t that Renee Spencer suffered through before she passed.

  “We have to search the place,” he said. “Stay behind me.”

  They went through Damon’s house room by room. It didn’t take long. Jubal led the way, checking behind each door and around any corner that didn’t offer a clear view. Fiona was close by, with her body at a 90-degree angle from him, so she could keep an eye on Jubal and anything that might try to sneak up behind them.

  When they reached the small kitchen, Jubal saw a small pool of blood in the sink.

  “He was in here.”

  “Not anymore,” Fiona said. She pointed at the small window over the sink.

  Damon had built the gazebo back in his married days with the help of Jubal’s dad. Susan was already making noise about the limitations of being married to a small town cop, so Damon was trying to?x the place up a bit to appease her. These days he sat out there on occasion, sipping a can of beer, but nothing stronger. Sometimes Jubal would join him.

  Now a dark form was slumped across the gazebo’s bench.

  Jubal stepped through the back door. It was suddenly hard to breathe, as though a band of steel had tightened across his chest.

  He took a couple steps toward the gazebo. He could hear the crunch of Fiona’s shoes on the dry soil behind him. She was keeping a bit of distance between them.

  Good girl. If there were trouble, maybe it wouldn’t take both of them.

  Jubal took two more steps. He was?fteen feet from the gazebo. He could clearly see the back of the prone man’s head. It was de?nitely Damon.

  Damon sat up and swiveled his head around, farther than Jubal thought possible.

  “Damon?”

  Fiona gasped.

  Damon was through the gazebo’s screen door and running at Jubal.

  Jubal froze, his shotgun held loosely in his hands. He could not accept that Damon had turned into a monster. This was a man he had looked up to his whole life. And loved-something he’d never told the older man.

  Now the dead sheriff glared at him with orange eyes. Folds and?aps, where the blisters had burst, covered his gray skin. Off-white saliva stretched between his upper and lower teeth. His hands were curled into killing claws. Sheriff Damon Ortega snarled, sounding more animal than human.

  “Damon, stop,” Jubal said, as the zombie sheriff barreled into him, knocking him to the ground. Jubal rolled onto his back and pulled the trigger of the shotgun.

  The blast hit Damon squarely in the chest,?inging him backwards to the ground.

  Jubal got to his feet. “What have I done?”

  “You had to do it, Jube. He was going to kill us,” Fiona said.

  “Man, this is crazy. I don’t know if I can take much more…”

  Damon sat up, grinning, with a gaping hole in his chest. His mouth dropped open and he made a sound that reminded Jubal of Jurassic Park pterodactyls.

  “F-fuck,” Jubal said.

  Damon got to his feet, swaying a little. Then he took a step forward. His bright orange eyes were stretched wide open, and the orbs looked as if they had no lids. His mouth gaped and emitted a croak.

  Jubal could do nothing as Damon took slow, staggering steps toward him. It was as if it were a dream that he’d soon wake up from.

  Yeah, that’s it. All I have to do is wake up. Just wait a few seconds and it’ll be over.

  Damon’s head burst apart into gray chunks and red mist in what seemed like slow motion. His headless body dropped to its knees, then keeled over.

  But Jubal hadn’t pulled the trigger of the shotgun. He looked down at his hands. The shotgun was gone. He looked over at Fiona.

  She had taken it from him and he hadn’t even noticed. The barrel still smoked from the killing shot.

  This wasn’t a nightmare; it was real. Why did he have to keep reminding himself of that?

  Jubal’s face felt funny. He reached a hand up; it was coated with tears. He looked at his wet?ngers as if the substance upon them was some alien liquid.

  “C’mon, baby. Let’s get out of here,” Fiona said, grabbing his upper arm. “There’s nothing you could have done.”

  They made their way around the house, their feet crunching in gravel. By the time they had reached the cruiser, the rising sun had dehydrated J
ubal’s tears.

  “We need more guns,” he said.

  It was another scorcher in downtown Serenity. But unlike most mornings, Main Street and its sidewalks were completely empty. Not even Bubba, the old dog owned by Phil Marx over at the Amoco, was to be seen; the mutt usually roamed up and down the sidewalks, looking for affection or handouts. He always had a wag of the tail for everyone.

  Fiona made a low moan in her throat.

  Jubal ignored it. The numbness in his mind had returned and he felt like a wooden puppet only loosely controlled by its own wooden brain.

  He rolled the cruiser to a stop in front of the sheriff’s of?ce.

  “You stay in the car, Fee. I’ll leave it on with the air going. Use the shotgun if you need to. I’m going to get more weapons.”

  Fiona nodded weakly, staring out the windshield at nothing much.

  Jubal laid the shotgun on the driver’s seat as he left the car. He slammed the door and paused, listening.

  A mourning dove cooed somewhere. There was a muf?ed crash and clatter, as if from a toppled piece of furniture in a far off building. Then nothing.

  Ignoring the piles of reports on the desk, which no longer meant anything to him-or to anybody-he walked straight to the gun cabinet. Jubal unlocked it and withdrew a Glock to replace the one the soldiers had con?scated, and two more shotguns just like the one in the car, along with an armload of ammo boxes. Looking around, he saw nothing else he thought he’d need.

  What do you need when the world is ending?

  What entertaining thoughts his mind conjured.

  Outside, the car door slammed.

  Jubal thought he heard Fiona say something. He laid the weapons and ammunition on the over?owing desk except for the Glock.

  He left the front door open and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Fiona stood behind the opened car door, sighting along the Mossberg laid across the top of the door.

  Jubal looked where she was aiming.

  Far down the street, the walking dead creature that had once been the lab worker Renee shambled towards them. She held something loosely in her grip. Jubal squinted against the light and saw that it was a severed hand. As he watched, she put one of its pale?ngers into her mouth and bit it off with a snap that Jubal could hear quite clearly even from this distance.