by Beth Hersant
New York was fucking freezing. After the mild temperatures of the Big Easy, it was quite a shock to step out of the airport and get hit with an icy blast of snow. All he wanted now was to get to his suite at the Mandarin Oriental and take a long hot shower before Francesca arrived.
According to the website for GFE (“the ultimate Girl Friend Experience”), Francesca was twenty-six years of age and had the perfect 36-24-33 hourglass shape. She was a commercial model, but there was “more to her than just stunning good looks.” Apparently, she was cultured, well-read and warm-hearted … and, judging by the way she busted out of her bikini top in one of her photos, seriously enhanced. All of that, he knew, was just shinola. What he wanted was to curl up next to a warm body and listen to a gentle voice speak to him about … well, anything really.
Tammany had been spot on about the PTSD, of course. He’d suspected for some time that he suffered from a raging case of the disorder, but had always resisted seeing anyone about it. He didn’t want to be branded as crazy. Besides, the prospect of having to unpick all the tangled mess inside his head was just too daunting. And so he sought comfort where he could find it. Some people turned to drugs, for some it was binge eating and he turned to the Francescas of this world — that and a nice Chardonnay.
When she arrived hours later, she was a vision of loveliness — tall, blond and dressed to the nines. He’d specified in his email that they would be dining at Per Se. However, despite having missed his lunch (thanks to that lunatic in New Orleans), he really wasn’t hungry. A micro-expression of disappointment flitted across the girl’s face for the briefest moment, and then she was all smiles. He did have such a lovely room and evenings in were always so “cosy.” Surprisingly her voice grated on him. The tinkling stream of her words was, it turned out, not what he wanted after all. He kissed her to shut her up.
But her silence was not his only aim. For some reason, he felt compelled to taste this woman, to forcibly worm his tongue into her mouth.
“Ow! You bit me!” she cried and pushed him away.
And he had — hard enough to draw blood.
As she held a handkerchief to her lip, she mumbled through the fabric, “What is the matter with you? And what is that taste?” She rushed to the bathroom to rinse her mouth out and that is when she saw the teeth marks just beneath her lower lip. That was going to take a shit-ton of makeup to cover.
The date ended quickly after that. Francesca relied too heavily on her looks to chance an encounter with someone who bit. She had a lunch date tomorrow afternoon and another in the evening and so she had better get home and put some ice on that lip. And, she decided, she’d get that son of a bitch banned with the agency. Idiot.
After she’d gone, Daniel sat there with her blood still on his mouth. The taste of it was comforting somehow, and he thought about his first book on modern vampire culture. For the first time he could see the attraction of that lifestyle. He curled up in bed with his laptop to watch The Kiss of the Vampire and soon fell asleep.
He was back in that closet as the house burned around him. He could hear his father shouting. He wanted to cry out to him “I’m here, I’m here!” but when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He was so scared he could not move. The heat was unbearable and Daniel pressed himself back against the wall in an attempt to get away from it. God, it was so hot.
He jerked awake and kicked the covers off. He was burning up and the room seemed to sway around him. It must be that flu that was going around New Orleans.
His go-to maneuver for any discomfort, however, was close at hand. He grabbed his laptop and brought up the notes he’d typed on the plane. At first the document was a blur — it might have been typed in a ‘wingdings’ font for all the sense it made to him. Gradually the gibberish resolved itself into words. He scrolled to the bottom of the document and began to type: “The fundamental value of the Voodoo religion lies in its …” His mind went blank; the word he’d been about to add skittered away and the whole point he’d been about to make went with it. He lay propped up in bed for a long time frowning at the screen, but nothing came to him. He set the laptop aside, but felt too ill and uncomfortable to go back to sleep. He was suddenly restless and agitated, though surely that was nothing new. Any PTSD sufferer will tell you that the anxiety keeps your stress levels thrumming along in fifth gear. For some reason, however, it was different this time. Usually when he got anxious, he withdrew. He sat at home, turned his phone off and worked. Why then did his agitation urge him to get up and get dressed and go out? He had to move and the urgency to do so made his fingers tremble as he tried to button his shirt. The result was not confidence-inspiring. His shirt was askew leaving a flap with a few unused buttons dangling at the bottom. This at least disguised the fact that he’d forgotten to zip up his fly. He slipped on a pair of loafers with no socks and that is how he ventured out into the snowy December night.
New Orleans. In Voodoo a zombie is made by first incapacitating someone with toxins so he appears to be dead. Once he has been buried, the bokor (someone who practices black magic) will dig him up. Through the use of poisonous herbs and dark ceremony the magician extracts his victim’s ti bonanj (his soul and that which gives him free will and identity). This he stores in a small clay jar. What is left is an extremely malleable shell that can be used as slave labor, doing only his master’s will.
As Tammany sat in her recliner, she reflected on the fact that this new and terrible virus functioned very much like a bokor. It seemed to hollow you out, effectively killing the person you are and turning you into a slave to serve its own ends. She was not a trained nurse, but she understood sickness. And she knew that diseases were compelled to reproduce. They could only achieve this through transmission to new hosts who would in turn pass the virus on. That, essentially, was what the chaos at the dock had been all about. The infected had to spread the disease and hence were drawn to the great crowd of people trying to escape. And now, she looked at her bandaged arm, she was turning into one of those— what was the word they used in that TV show Helix? — vectors. That would be her fate unless she did something to stop it.
She rose, went to her bedroom closet and started rummaging around. At the very back was a beat up old cardboard box that held the only things she had left of her mother. Cecile Trudeau had never settled down in this life. She was the quintessential wild child who eloped with thirty-nine-year-old Clement Lanuit when she was just eighteen. Their one child, Tammany, might have saved them. Nothing makes you grow up faster than having a child of your own, but somehow the vital link was never made. When Cecile looked at her baby, she did not feel that desperate love that binds a woman to an infant. She saw an obstruction, something that would keep her in at night while Clement went out and got up to who-knows-what. It drove her insane to think of him off screwing around while she was stuck at home playing Mary Poppins to some mewling creature that never stopped crying. And so Tammany was handed to Eula. As the years passed, the girl saw her mother only a few times: she’d breeze in, stay for a day or two and then depart, always with kisses and protestations of love.
“Stupid,” Tammany muttered as she surveyed the sad collection of relics in the box. There was a phone number scrawled onto the back of an envelope — but no name attached to it. There were two earrings, one with the stone (a faux emerald) missing. There was a cassette tape of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and a bottle. The label read Amobarbital; she poured the contents into her hand. There were enough of the little oblong pills to do the job.
And now for the rest. First she allowed herself one good cry. She knew she was old and that she had led a full and happy life. More than that, she knew that she’d made the right choice. Fifty-nine children: that’s how many she managed to put on the boat while everything went crazy around her. Fifty-nine. Could she really ask for a better legacy? And so what if she didn’t get to go to Honey Island and watch her grandkids grow up … ah, there it
was. That thought really got her going. What she wouldn’t give to hold them one more time or to see her son’s face. But at least they were safe. She’d come to look upon Honey Island as a sort of promised land (or at least a promised swamp) where the people she loved could be free. But Moses didn’t reach the promised land and he’d worked for it his whole life. How could Tammany complain? And still she wept. Even people of great faith are allowed their moments of trepidation when the end comes. She let herself weep until the headache and the fever told her it was time to get moving.
A scream cut through the night and Tammany peeked out through a gap in her front curtains. She couldn’t see anything, but she knew what it meant. And that old William Butler Yeats poem came to her, the one that began with: “That is no country for old men.” And it wasn’t. Younger, stronger people would have to fight their way through this. She put on a vinyl record of Fats Domino’s Hey, Las Bas Boogie. Las Bas translates to “over there” and is sometimes used to refer to Papa Legba — “Papa-over-there” who sits at the crossroads where the human world intersects with that of the spirits.
“Will you come?” she asked aloud as she popped the top off a bottle of Grace and Grit beer and settled into her recliner. Then slowly, methodically, she swallowed one pill after another until they were all gone. She said her prayers and recited Psalm 23. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for …” she paused and a mischievous grin spread over her face. What was that line from Deep Blue Sea? “Because I carry a big stick and I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley!” She laughed. LL Cool J was a comedic genius.
Suddenly it grew very cold in her little house. She shivered and considered turning up the heat, but she couldn’t remember where the thermostat was. She reached for her beer and her hand clumsily knocked it aside.
“Not long now,” she said.
It was getting hard to breathe and she struggled to keep her eyes open — which was important because there, in her living room, stood a very old man with a cane.
“Legba.”
He held out a hand and helped her up. “Come, my dear.”
And she felt so warm and so loved and so … what? Done. Completed. She felt like a symphony that had written itself and now, that the last note had been played, she could finally rest.
Part Three
Stars
Chapter One
On the Road
“I was surprised … by how easy the act of leaving was… The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“…the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was… I wasn’t scared. I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Tanya Morin grabbed her little brother’s hand and ran. She had to get out of that house, had to run from the screaming and the chaos and the blood. It was not a conscious decision made, but the instinct to take flight, the instinct of deer when wolves prowl through the valley. But it did not save her.
She’d come home after a date with Jeff and had, in fact, expected an ugly scene. She was rolling in an hour past curfew and was ready for a guilt-trip, a lecture, and the final pronouncement of “You’re grounded.” But what greeted her when she opened the door… Her mother lay in the hallway, blood from a jagged wound on her shoulder pooling on the beige carpet.
“Mom!” Tanya ran to her.
Clinging to consciousness by the barest thread, Marjorie Morin blinked up at her daughter. “Run,” the word came out in a hoarse whisper and the effort required to give it voice tipped the woman back into blackness.
Tanya pulled her mobile from her jeans pocket and dialed 911. A calm voice asked: “Emergency, do you need police, ambulance or fire?”
“Ambulance! My mom!” And she rattled off her address.
“It’s ok, an ambulance is on the way, but I need you to tell me what’s happening.”
“I — I don’t know — I…” At that moment she heard a low moan coming from the living room. “Hang on,” she whispered.
While the dispatcher tried again and again to elicit details from the girl, Tanya rose and stepped robotically up to the lounge door. But it wasn’t their living room — their living room was white. Her mother, sick of the constant clutter of a family of six, had gone minimalist and, ridiculously, decorated the family room in white: white carpet, white sofa and chairs, white paint on the walls. But these walls were red, the furniture crimson, the deep pile rug a whole spectrum from pink to red to brown. And there in the most colorful patch was her father.
Liam Morin, the fourth tourist on Dr. Edwin Caldwell’s list, was presently gnawing on his ten-year-old son’s arm. Mitch screamed and writhed in his father’s grip. Amy, his twin sister, lay nearby bleeding out from a gash in her throat. And Tommy, the seven-year-old, cowered in a corner, his face a white mask of horror beneath the smears of blood that streaked it.
Tanya screamed and that was a mistake. Her dad’s head jerked up and he snarled at her like a wild animal. Only then did she heed her mother’s words; she ran. But she did not make a beeline for the front door, instead she dashed over to Tommy and was gathering the child up in her arms when her father collided with her. The 250-pound man barreled full bore into the 115-pound teenage girl and Tanya felt like she had been hit by a train. The impact drove the side of her head into the wall, denting the plaster. She collapsed on top of Tommy, but was unaware of the fact. She was confused, her vision was blurred and the pain in her head was monumental.
Liam’s teeth fastened onto her ear and tore it away. And that pain was enough to cut through the haze. The girl screamed and kicked and flailed until she managed to wriggle free — her attempt aided by the fact that her father was currently choking on the silver hoop earring that had come away with her ear. She struggled to her feet.
Tanya grabbed her little brother’s hand and ran out the back door. Her father — with the earring still stuck in his craw — pursued, driving the pair away from the road and deeper into the woods. Tanya reached the shore of Black Sturgeon Lake and didn’t even pause; the lake was a solid sheet of ice now, especially around the shallow edges. Dragging Tommy behind her, she fled along the ice and took refuge beneath an old wooden dock where she pulled Tommy out of the moonlight and into the safety of the shadows. From there they could hear their father bellowing and crashing through the undergrowth and they could also hear the more hopeful sounds of sirens approaching.
“I’m cold,” Tommy whispered, but the fog of her concussion was settling over Tanya’s brain and she did not comprehend that the child wore only a pair of Spiderman pyjamas and had lost his slippers somewhere in the woods.
“Just need to rest for a minute,” she murmured and passed out.
The incubation period for rabies varies from one case to the next. The distance from the bite to the brain, essentially how far the virus has to travel to reach its objective, often determines how long it takes before the patient is symptomatic. New Rabies adhered to this principle as well and with a bite on her ear, it was not long before Tanya Morin sickened with the disease. The headache of concussion blurred into the headache of infection. The confusion of a brain injury segued into the delirium of the virus. When she finally walked away from the dock and the little blue body curled up beneath it, she no longer cared about the pain in her head, nor did she comprehend that she had suffered any great trauma or loss. She felt only the Need. She had to move, to search — for what she was unsure, but she’d know it when she saw it and she had to get moving.
And so it was that she came to be on the side of the road when Lester Jeffrey passed by. He saw the girl standing out in the snowstorm along a lonely stretch of highway and pulled the rig over to give her a lift. The girl came straight to the truck, but had difficulty with the door, so he hopped out to hel
p her.
“What are you doing out on a night like this?” he yelled over the wind. “Are you all right?”
He was a father and always picked up young hitchhikers so that he could drop them somewhere safe. There were too many crazies on the road and he had nightmares about these kids ending up dead in a ditch. He could not see the girl well in the dim light, but she was slight in build and looked like a strong gust of wind might blow her away. He reached out to open the door for her. And that was when the little thing grabbed his arm in a surprisingly strong grip. Her head darted forward and her teeth fastened onto his bare hand. Lester cried out in pain and surprise and tried desperately to shake her off. She would not budge. No matter what he did, no matter how he flailed or hit at her (and yes, he did eventually resort to blows), she would not relinquish her grip. It reminded him of a pit bull — he’d heard those dogs “lock on” when they bite and can still hold on even after death. The longer she held on, the harder he hit until finally one of his blows connected with her jaw. Tanya went reeling backward. She paused only a moment and then came at him again, but Lester was no dummy. As soon as his hand was free, he scrambled up into his truck and slammed the door shut. The girl hit it head on, fell back and ran at it again, all the while uttering a terrible, haunting wail. Lester, with his hand hastily wrapped in a hanky, got the hell outta Dodge. He only paused to bandage the wound properly when he had put a few miles between himself and that lunatic.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” he muttered as he dumped peroxide on his hand and wrapped it in clean gauze. The bite hurt like a son of a bitch, but he’d had worse. And it could certainly wait until he finished his run. He was hauling a shipment of games from Everest Toys in Ontario down to Go! Games and Toys at the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania. Little did he know that he was also transporting something else now. The virus was again on the move.
