Of Starlight and Plague

by Beth Hersant

  Chapter Two

  Zombieburgh

  “STOP THE UNDEAD IN THE ZOMBIE CAPITOL OF THE WORLD: MONROEVILLE!”

  Zombieburgh Lazer Tag Website

  “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”

  George A. Romero, Dawn of the Dead, 1978

  Louella Bernhard pulled into the parking lot of the Monroeville Mall. Her grandson Sam wanted a guitar for Christmas, a (she looked at his wish list again) “Faith Electroacoustic Guitar — Hi Gloss Saturn Cutaway.” She had one on layaway at The Guitar Center, but first she had other errands to run. She hit Bath & Body Works. Her daughter Peg liked that Cucumber Melon gift set that they do. And then it was on to Macy’s. Peg and her husband had gotten their little girl a Victorian dollhouse from Santa. It was an expensive purchase so, to help with the cost, Lou offered to buy the furniture that went with it. Standing in line at the cash register, her stomach began to growl. She had a lot to do, but surely she could take half-an-hour to grab some lunch. She paid for her purchases and headed for the food court.

  Outside, at the far end of the parking lot, there sat a truck with an empty trailer. The cab — a Kenworth Sleeper — was dark and the windows were fogged with condensation. And in the bed behind the driver’s seat lay Lester Jeffrey. Since making his delivery, he’d come down with a hell of a bug: high fever, roaring headache and nausea. He laid down two days ago and didn’t get up again. He drifted in and out of consciousness and dreamt of the hitchhiker, the girl he’d tried to help. But in the dream she wasn’t a girl, not completely. She had a wolf’s maw filled with long, sharp fangs and she followed him wherever he went, matching him step for step. The dream held him and he managed to fight his way to the surface only a few times over those two days. He’d take a drink of water, grimacing at the jagged pain in his throat, and then he’d be sucked down again into a nightmare of claws and teeth. On the third day he rose again, hungry for the first time in ages, and went out in search of food. He left the cab door standing wide open and staggered toward the mall — no coat, no shoes and with the rock salt that had been spread in the parking lot sticking to the bottom of his socks.

  Turns out the mall was the worst place for him. It was too bright and the mix of human chatter and music was a din in his ears. And dear God he felt bad, like 200 pounds of walking roadkill. He spotted the Food Court and, more importantly, an empty chair where he could sit and rest for a while. But there was no peace to be had. There was a crying baby and two women laughing and someone dropped a tray. It hurt.

  “Shut up shut up shut up,” he moaned and clamped his hands over his ears.

  Louella looked up, aware for the first time that this raggedy man was clutching at his head and rocking back and forth in his seat. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he looked at her then. He went very still and stared at her. The look reminded Lou of George Nuss. As the town lecher he used to look at her like that when she was younger and still had a discernible waistline. It was an unsettling look of interest without empathy. With a glance old George could make you feel like a piece of meat. And here it was again, repeated on the face of this stranger; but she was old now, and chubby, and should be past all that. The man made a sound then, like the one a dog makes when it chokes itself straining against its leash and a line of saliva ran down his chin. She pushed her half-eaten lunch away, gathered her bags and pocketbook, and rose to leave.

  The man stood too.

  He was between her and the exit, but there was an escalator behind her between Bourbon St. Cafe and Charley’s Grilled Subs. She’d take that to get away from him. The Food Court was growing quiet now as more and more people stopped to gawk at this man with his stringy hair and feral eyes. Thick ropes of foam caught in the stubble on his chin and soaked the front of his shirt.

  “Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?” A man, in a black ranger-style hat and with a security patch on his sleeve, stepped in between the stranger and Lou.

  Lester looked at him, a ghastly smile pulling his lips back to show his teeth, and then he lunged. His head darted forward as if he was going to steal a kiss. Instead his teeth fastened on the corner of the security guard’s mouth and he ripped the flesh away. The guard screamed and that was the cue: panic erupted. In a society primed for terrorist attacks and mass shootings, you run at the first sign of trouble and Louella was caught up in the stampede. She was jostled and swept along with the crowd as she reflexively clutched her bags to her and struggled to stay on her feet. They surged out of the Food Court as more security guards fought to get in. As the herd reached the main and much wider corridor of the mall, they encountered greater chaos. Instead of one group moving one way, they collided with many fractured gangs of confused people, panicked by the shrieks and dashing in all directions. Louella was swept left toward Macy’s. And all was a blur as she ran.

  A large man shoved Lou out of his way, slamming her face-first into the glass front of a store. She found herself looking up into the face of a zombie. His green visage was framed by a shock of black hair, his eyes were blank, his mouth a gaping hole dotted with jagged teeth. It was a painted mural with the words “Zombieburgh Laser Tag” etched beneath. She stared at the zombie picture for what seemed like a long time. That’s right. This is where Romero filmed Dawn of the Dead and there used to be a clocktower and a bridge over an artificial pond where she tossed pennies and made wishes as a child. And in the movie the zombies took possession of the mall. They tottered through the shops to the chipper xylophone notes of Herbert Chappell’s “The Gonk.” How did it go again?

  “Ma’am?” a woman behind her asked.

  Louella spun around and looked at her vaguely.

  “Are you ok?” The woman was middle-aged, nicely dressed and wearing a Macy’s name tag.

  “Uh, yeah,” Louella answered.

  “We’re asking everyone to come into the store. They want us to lock all the shops down until they’ve resolved …” a banshee-like shriek echoed from the Food Court, “… that.”

  “He bit him,” Louella whispered.

  “What?”

  “He bit that man in the face!” Louella’s voice was rising in pitch.

  “Come on.” The woman took Lou gently by the arm and led her into the store. She let the last few stragglers in and then locked the plexiglass security doors.

  Standing there amidst the wide-eyed crowd, Louella noticed that there were dark flecks on the backs of her hands. She rubbed at them and they left red smears on her skin. Blood. She wondered briefly if she was bleeding, but then realized, no. It was from the security guard. Her stomach lurched as she headed for the ladies’ room. There, in the diffuse yellow light, she stared dumbfounded at what she saw in the mirror. There was blood on her face, in her hair and on her coat. Louella scrubbed at herself with the coarse paper towels until her skin was raw. The soap — she’d heard once that it was supposed to be “cherry-almond scented” — had a thick, cloying smell that did nothing to help her stomach and yet she used up a whole dispenser’s worth in an effort to clean herself up. With the distraction of the blood gone, she began to notice other things: the ghastly pallor of her face, the bruise blossoming on her right cheek, and below it the split lip that was swelling up fast. That must have been from when she hit the glass. She let out a long, slow breath.

  “What the fuck was that?” she asked her own reflection. The Louella in the mirror had no answer.

  It had been an animal attack. Human violence was different — it was all guns or knives or fists. But this was tooth and claw, bite and rend. And it should have been her. If the security guard had not stepped in when he did, it would have been her. Dear God. Her hands shook as that “You’ve-just-dodged-a-bullet” relief flooded through her, and yet why? Why should she be spared and the guard not? It was all so random, so arbitrary, so damn ridiculous. And she saw it again in vivid detail. The teeth, slick with drool, had fastened on
the man’s flesh and tore his bottom lip away. And the blood flew and the guard’s incisors lay exposed down to the gum-line and then there was the crowd, running, driving her along and she was afraid that she’d fall and be crushed under all those panicked feet. She’d hit the glass front of that laser tag place like a bug hitting a windshield and the whole side of her face throbbed from the impact. She dug through her purse and dry-swallowed two Extra Strength Excedrin. And then, because there was nothing for it, she took one more deep, steadying breath and went out to face the world.

  The woman sitting opposite Officer Vince Miller looked like a refugee from a war zone. Given her age, the bruises on her face and the visible signs of shock, he’d already requested that a paramedic come take a look at her. While they waited for the medic, he took her statement. They were still within that “Golden Hour” — the time period immediately after an event when a witness’s memory is at its best. And the old girl was absolutely clear about what had happened.

  “Did he say anything to you?” Miller asked.

  “No,” Louella shook her head. “At one point he was talking. He kept saying ‘Shut up’ over and over again.”

  “To who?”

  “No one. He just sat there with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. He was rocking back and forth. I wondered if he was hearing voices in his head.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He was coughing and drooling. He looked,” Lou broke off and shook her head again.

  “Go on,” Vince said gently.

  “He looked like the rabid fox we had on the farm two summers ago. He was so sick. Thing is: it didn’t even occur to me that he needed help. That I should call an ambulance for him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was afraid of him.”

  And she had been — immediately and without question. He looked absolutely wretched and yet this evoked no pity in her. She didn’t hover over her duty to help him. As he stared at her, her heart raced and every instinct screamed at her to get away from that slathering mouth.

  She pushed these thoughts away and told the cop everything about the incident that she could remember. Then she sat down — on the low bench in the Macy’s shoe department to wait for the paramedic. It was a nuisance. She just wanted to go home. But Officer Miller brought her a cup of vending machine hot chocolate and she sat nursing the drink, letting it warm her. The attack and the panicked run through the mall had taken, oh, maybe five minutes in total. But it was utterly transformative. It had taken her from the glow of Christmas lights and the gentle refrain of Silent Night that had played over the tannoy, to what Herman Melville called the “damp, drizzly November in my soul.” That line was from Moby Dick and Ishmael’s response to that feeling was to “quietly take to the ship.” Louella’s response was similar, an innate need to go to her place of solace. For her it was her farm, quiet save for the conversations of chickens and the lowing of her cows when their udders were full and it was time for milking. She just wanted to go home.

  Finally given the all clear, she walked back to her car, letting the cold air revive her and the snow and grit clean the blood off the soles of her shoes. Nat King Cole crooned The Christmas Song to her when she started the engine and she pulled her mobile from her purse and changed the playlist. It was a two-hour drive home and she needed something a little more rousing. Soon there was the steady beat of drum and cowbell and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliot advised that it was better to burn out than to fade away. And the music bucked her up enough for the journey ahead.

  She drove the back roads home, finally passing the old covered bridge on the outskirts of Midwood. When she was little, she was convinced that that was the bridge Washington Irving talked about in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. She could picture it all too clearly: the headless horseman pursuing a terror-stricken Ichabod Crane through the nighttime woods. Somewhere along the way, her child’s mind had tangled the Headless Horseman up with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that she learned about in church. They would come at the end of days and bring famine and death, war and pestilence. The association was so strong that she used to be terrified of that old bridge, certain that it symbolized the end of things. It did not take a huge imaginative leap. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon of a December day and already shadows had settled on the bridge. It was unlit and the interior was eerily dark. A cold nothingness. An abyss.

  At that moment, a tree branch raked the passenger door of her pickup truck. She’d gotten so carried away with her thoughts that she’d drifted too far to the right.

  “Dammit, woman, wake up,” she said aloud.

  She made herself go slow and safely all the way out to the farm. And it was only as she turned into the drive that she realized: she’d forgotten to pick up Sam’s guitar.

  Chapter Three

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  “One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.”

  James Russell Lowell

  “She had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth … she knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn’t understand it.”

  Max Brooks, World War Z

  The incident at Monroeville Mall took place on the twenty-second of December — one day after Otis Hudson was attacked in the parking lot of Whole Foods Market and one day after Emily Hardy stepped in front of a truck. Louella did not know about these other events and was soon caught up in the final preparations for Christmas. There was all the cooking and baking to be done. She had to rewrap one of Peg’s presents — the gold woven basket containing the bath products had gotten crushed in the stampede. And her friend Fletch drove her back to the mall to pick up the guitar. He even kept it at his house so that Sam would not spot the tell-tale shape and guess the surprise.

  She was surrounded by twinkling lights and gaily wrapped presents and Yogi Yorgesson singing I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas on WHMD. And in truth, she felt like crap. The bruise on her cheek had come up a deep purple and she had a fat lip. And she wasn’t sleeping well. Granted, her nights would have been disturbed anyway. She’d read an article once about how, as you age, hormonal changes in your body adversely affect your sleep. But this was different. She dreamt of Monroeville every night, jerking awake to find her covers in a knot and her nightgown drenched in sweat. The nightmares were so bad, she dreaded going back to sleep. And so she sat up, watching old Frasier reruns with the sound turned down so she wouldn’t wake Sam.

  More than anything, she was just sad. The world could be such a brutal place and it took so much energy to absorb it all and still wrap presents and make a honey roast ham and bake cookies and pretend she was excited about the holiday. And, unfortunately, it was about to get worse.

  A week later Louella began to realize that the attack at Monroeville was not an isolated incident. As she listened to the news of Otis’s assault on Lance Jessop on the twenty-ninth and how Nicholas Durand was shot after biting someone on the thirtieth, she suddenly felt very cold. That was three similar attacks in just over a week. What on earth was going on? As Christmas gave way to New Years, she tried to ignore her growing sense of unease. She told herself that it was a coincidence and that people — quite a lot of people in fact — were nuts. Drugs, mental illness — anything like that could have prompted the attack she’d witnessed. She knew that. It was just common sense. But for the first time in her life, her good, old-fashioned common sense was being shouted down by something else, some instinct that goaded her. And she was afraid. A drop in barometric pressure could irritate an arthritic joint and so her wrists ached before every rainfall. But this … this ache went deeper and she felt sure: a storm was coming.

  Her daughter Peg, who ran the Carnegie Library in town, was surprised to find her mother waiting at its entrance when she went in to work on January second. Louella loved the library and came often, but to be camped out in the cold before opening hou
rs…

  “Is everything ok?” Peg asked.

  “Yeah, I just want to look a few things up.”

  “A half an hour before opening time…”

  “I knew you’d be here,” Louella gestured impatiently at the door. Once inside she made her way to the internet terminals and switched one on.

  Peg watched her, confused. Her mother was going to surf the net? I mean, yeah, she knew how; but she rarely did. “Can I help with something?”

  “Nope,” Lou mumbled distractedly. That typing course she’d had in high school held her in good stead because her fingers flew over the keyboard. “I’m fine here, honey. You go do what you have to.”

  Margaret (Peg to family and friends) certainly had enough to be getting on with. She gathered up the books from the “Featured” shelf. These catered to the pre-Christmas period: recipe books, craft books in case you wanted to give homemade gifts, tales by Dickens and Clement C. Moore. She replaced them with books on dieting, exercise and how to stop smoking. Her patrons, she knew, would have New Year’s resolutions to keep. When their enthusiasm waned — in roughly two weeks time — she’d replace the dieting books with novels set in tropical locations and nature books that focused on spring (all to fight the winter doldrums).

  She paused in her work for a moment and looked at her mother. The old woman was hunched over the keyboard with a strawberry Twizzler dangling from her mouth. Uh oh. Louella’s Twizzler compulsion only emerged when she was stressed. But Peg didn’t have time to ponder this. She had to run a “Babies and Books” session in forty minutes and the library would soon be full of squealing toddlers. She put the coffee on and got back to work.