by Beth Hersant
“Shouldn’t we help them?” Katie Boehler spoke up.
Mayor Albitz removed his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. “My first priority is to keep this town safe. And I don’t know how else to do it.”
“I appreciate that, Mayor,” Pastor Kulp of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church stood up. “But let me run this scenario by you. What if a refugee, just some guy trying to get his family to safety, shows up at the town limits and won’t be diverted? What if, in desperation, he tries to drive into Midwood? Are we going to shoot him?”
“Hell yeah—” a voice came from the back.
Pastor Kulp pressed on. “Are we going to shoot his wife? His kids?”
Patience was staring hard at the mayor. “Answer him,” she said quietly.
“We might have to … to protect the town.”
There was a general uproar over this. While some of the townsfolk expressed their horror at the idea, others shouted that the safety of our own children should come first. We should do whatever it takes.
“Are you telling me,” Katie shouted, “that the only way to protect this town is to shoot everyone who comes near it?”
Patience rose and people fell silent. “That is the point I want to make. There are plenty of nonlethal ways to defend Midwood. Tire spikes, barricades, check points…”
“So then what?” a voice from the back piped up. “What do we actually do with the people who come here?”
“You get someone from the hospital to check them for symptoms,” Doctor Rhoads entered the fray. “We could quarantine all newcomers for twenty-four to forty-eight hours to see if they develop a fever.”
“And when the food runs out?”
Louella rose. “On that point, I assume that you’ll want help from the farmers. None of us are located within the town boundaries; so if you want my crops and Arnold’s meat …”
“And our dairy,” Everett Weller added.
“… then there will need to be some traffic in and out of Midwood anyway,” Louella finished and sat down.
“That’s right. Surely it’s possible to protect the town without turning this place into a scene from Mad Max,” Katie said.
“And surely,” Fletcher’s quiet voice rose, “the first step to controlling Midwood’s destiny is to control our own fear.”
And so the people of Midwood set up their defenses. At every point of ingress, they staggered obstacles — school buses, delivery trucks and fitch barriers. These created a chicane to slow approaching traffic. Cars that slalomed through would then come to armed checkpoints where the occupants could be screened for symptoms.
Louella no longer felt that her concerns were stupid. Therefore construction at the farm was well underway. Alec came in through the back door and stomped the snow off his boots.
“It’s finished,” he said, blowing on his cold fingers.
“The walls?” Lou gazed out the back window to see. The new walls enclosing the farmyard between house and barn were covered with long strips of green tarp. “Are you planning an unveiling?”
“No, we’re getting some pretty strong gusts of wind down off the mountain. I needed to cover it until the mortar cures.” He flopped down on one of the kitchen chairs and Peg handed him a cup of coffee.
While he drank it, he looked over the plans he’d drawn up.
“As far as the front of the house goes, I can take out the windows,” he said, “and brick up the gaps.”
Fletch, who was still trying to defrost after helping Alec lay bricks all morning, sat hunched over a copy of Dan Spencer’s The Castle at War in Medieval England and Wales. “You should leave gaps that we could shoot through if necessary.”
Alec thought for a minute. “It’s doable. And I can attach a removable plate over each hole to keep the draft out. What really worries me, though, is the front porch roof.”
“What about it?” Louella asked.
“If I brick up the second-story windows, then this place is going to be really dark and really stuffy. I was wondering if it would be better to install metal shutters that we can close if there’s a threat or open to get some light and air in.”
“That would also give us elevated firing positions,” Fletch nodded.
“Yeah, but those shutters won’t be as strong as the brick I’m putting in downstairs. That porch roof is essentially a platform leading right up to the most vulnerable points on the front of the building. I think it needs to come down.”
Louella sat for a moment, massaging her temples. My house. My beautiful house, she thought glumly but said only, “Ok.”
“We can take the sheet metal from the porch roof and use it to reinforce the front door on the outside. Honey, you said Patience had an idea for securing the door?”
Peg nodded. Mae was sitting on her lap coloring so Peg grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a blue crayon to sketch it out. “We secure it with three removable cross beams as well as a security bar that slants at a forty-five degree angle from the door to a bracket set into the floor. She said that that kind of setup could withstand a battering ram.”
“That’s really good,” Alec said. “And that just leaves the back door of the barn.”
Fletch shrugged. “Can’t we reinforce it the same way as the front door?”
As the two men talked, Peg watched Louella. They were discussing major changes to her home and yet she said very little. “You all right, mom?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been pretty quiet through all this. What are you thinking?”
Louella had been thinking of the porch they were about to tear down. On their wedding night James had scooped her up, carried her up the porch steps and in through a front door which would soon be heavily barred. She remembered summer evenings sitting out there with James, drinking iced tea and watching the kids run through the sprinklers to get cool. And she’d always sit on the front steps shucking corn to boil and freeze. And while she worked the sun would set in brilliant purples and oranges over the fields and she’d take a deep breath and know a moment of exquisite peace.
She’d been so caught up in these thoughts that she had missed the question. “Huh?”
“I asked what you thought about all this,” Peg said gently.
“I think that what I want and what we need are two different things.” She looked at Alec. “Do it. All of it. I just can’t watch.”
And so everyone made ready. It made them feel empowered, you know, to actually be doing something. Sitting at home, watching the news, had an almost soporific effect — you could sit there in your cosy living room and foster the illusion that what you were watching was mere fiction — a made-for-TV movie, perhaps — and everything was normal and ok. But then you switched off the tube and the movie was still playing. Everyone was talking about the infection and there’s your son’s school bus parked sideways on the bridge and men with guns patrolled the roads. So you rolled up your sleeves and volunteered for guard duty. You filled sandbags and pulled on a pair of thick gloves so you could help string up barbed wire. And it made you feel better, more in control. But then your shift at the checkpoints would end and you’d shuffle — exhausted and half-frozen — back home and that’s when the doubts started to whisper in your ear. Was it enough? Would anything ever be enough? And, even if Midwood survived unscathed, then what? With the rest of the world descending into chaos, what future could you really hope to have? What life for your children?
You never asked these questions out loud. The people of Midwood (you included) were bound and determined to remain calm and sensible and controlled. But everyone around you laughed a little too heartily at bad jokes and their tight smiles were more like grimaces. And everyone in town talked in low voices, the way you’d talk at a funeral, and really that was apt. Not only were people dying, but your whole civilization seemed to be gasping out its last breath. The whole world right now w
as a fucking funeral and the people of Midwood were grieving. It was no longer possible to ignore what was happening and so they swiftly passed out of the denial stage and settled comfortably into the next one: anger. You could point to a thousand tiny examples of how it flared up — parents clashing with their children, couples arguing more frequently, the odd snipe between neighbors, but in no case was it more pronounced than in that of Imelda Zimmerman.
She was a deeply discomforting figure within the town. Her story was tragic. She had tried for twelve long years to have a baby and finally fell pregnant at the age of thirty-eight. And then one stormy night, she went into labor when she was only about twenty-four weeks along. The delivery was a stillbirth and, because her womb wouldn’t contract and close off the blood vessels, she began to hemorrhage. To save her life, doctors at Midwood Medical Center had to perform an emergency hysterectomy. Later, as she cradled the child, a nurse came in to try and coax the body away from her. Imelda looked at her, smiled and asked, “Is it time for her bath?”
Imelda Zimmerman was never the same after that. She became a gaunt, hollow-eyed figure who haunted Main Street, asking random youngsters, “Are you my Melanie?” The town’s children were terrified of her, believing her to be a kidnapper or a witch. And then she started picking other women’s babies up — right out of their buggies without so much as a ‘mother-may-I.’ It is damn hard to be easy around someone who does that.
Yes, she hadn’t hurt anyone so far. But she was putting her hands on other people’s kids and she clearly wasn’t stable. Her husband Frank, Doc Rhoads, Patience, her friends and neighbors — all tried to get her to accept the help she so clearly needed. And she’d try for a time. She’d attend counseling sessions at the hospital and get her prescription for antidepressants filled at Holliger’s Drug Store. But no attempted solution would stick. Eventually Frank Zimmerman threw up his hands in defeat and ran off with Deborah Scharf, a waitress from The Pilgrim Tavern. Apparently they’d moved to Fresno.
Shortly after he left, Imelda became “creepily religious.” The town of Midwood was made up of a mix of devout Lutherans and Baptists. Everyone of them knew their Bible and most had a cross displayed somewhere in their homes as a reminder of who they belong to. But Mrs. Zimmerman had festooned her disintegrating house with crosses. It was like she was trying to ward off vampires. There was a particularly ominous cross on her front lawn — cheap wood covered in black creosote — that looked like a grave marker. That, along with the sagging shutters on the windows, the peeling paint, the leaning porch roof and the tangle of thorns that spilled over onto the sidewalk to nip at your ankles as you passed by, all combined to make the Zimmerman place look like a stereotypical haunted house. It was the ultimate dare among children to walk up to that porch on Halloween night. The bravest would stand there (under the glare of a badly rendered crucifix that made Jesus look demented), they’d ring the bell, yell “Trick-or-Treat!” and then run as if all the demons of hell were on their heels.
And all that was before the pandemic. As you can imagine, the stress of the plague did nothing to improve Imelda Zimmerman’s mental health. One day, Clara Jung walked into Holliger’s Drug Store to pick up some diapers for baby Callum. As she hunted for the right size of Pampers on the shelf, she suddenly heard him scream. She spun around to see Imelda standing there by his buggy holding a clear syringe with a bright yellow plunger (the kind you used with Children’s Tylenol).
“What did you do?!” Clara shouted as Callum coughed and spluttered.
“I … I helped her,” Imelda stammered.
Clara launched herself at the woman, grabbing her by the jacket and slamming her into a display of formula milk. “What did you give him?! I’ll kill you!” Old Holliger managed to peel the two women apart. He took Clara and her baby up to the hospital to get him checked out. Patience, after an hour of trying to coax some sense out of Zimmerman, was finally told, “It was just Children’s Tylenol … to protect her from the virus.” And she was telling the truth, but that did not improve people’s disposition toward her.
Compared to other places, Midwood was safe, protected and infection-free. But it wasn’t right. It was “on the turn” — like milk starting to curdle — as people became more tense and irritable and prey to irrationalities. The town’s cumulative anger, which had been vague and diffuse without a target, now bulls-eyed in on Zimmerman. From a psychological perspective, it made a twisted kind of sense. People were afraid but impotent; you can’t really fight microbes spreading through a country. You just had to sit and wait for it to arrive. But then Imelda unsettled them even more and here, at last, was an enemy you could square up to. A tangible something to fight. She became the town boogeyman. Her house was egged by teenagers and a vicious rumor spread. A few folks had read Max Brooks’s World War Z and remembered that some of the characters in it engaged in “mercy killings.” Basically, they slaughtered their kids to spare them the horror of the apocalypse. That sounded like just the sort of half-assed conclusion that Zimmerman might come to. What if she decided that the best way to “help” the children of Midwood was to kill them before the infection hit? No, she hadn’t poisoned the Jung boy. But she easily could have done. She could have put anything in that syringe. Less than forty-eight hours of chewing on that image was enough to convince quite a few of the townsfolk that Imelda Zimmerman was a homicidal maniac in embryo — “a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.” And a petition with over 2,000 signatures was presented to Mayor Albitz. It demanded the immediate expulsion of Imelda Zimmerman from Midwood.
And then Judge Huber cut her loose. He gave her a court date in a month’s time to answer charges of assault on the Jung boy and sent her home. Patience was apoplectic when she walked into the station to find Imelda’s cell empty. She got on the phone to Huber.
“Sir, that is not a good idea,” she said, struggling to control her tone.
“She isn’t a danger to the public — you and I both know that. So how can I hold her?”
“Yeah, but what about her safety?”
“Heavens-to-Betsy, this is Midwood. What do you think is going to happen?”
“On a normal day, nothing. But these aren’t normal times. Everyone in this town is twitchy and under a helluva lot of stress. The mood is ugly, Bill. I’m telling you right now this is a mistake.”
It was to no avail. The troubled woman was released from the town lockup and at four-thirty the following morning, someone dowsed that wooden front porch and its hideous crucifix with gasoline and struck a match. Oblivious as always to the harsh realities of life, Imelda Zimmerman sat in her rocking chair in the nursery, quietly singing lullabies to a child who wasn’t there.
And so in the midst of a viral pandemic, Patience Bernhard found herself embroiled in a murder investigation. Normally she would have called in the experts from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Arson Squad, but that was impossible now; and so she sifted through the debris with only a deputy to help her. It was clear where the blaze had originated and it was equally clear that Imelda had sat in the upstairs nursery without making any attempt to flee. The nursery window overlooked her backyard and she could easily have stepped from that window onto the roof of the back porch and dropped down to safety. Instead she just sat there and died. What was not at all clear was whodunit. The neighbors had all been asleep when the fire broke out and by the time they awoke and called in the Volunteer Fire Company, there was no sign of the arsonist.
An accelerant had been used and had destroyed all fingerprint and fiber evidence. The blaze had melted the snow, so Patience didn’t even have a boot print to go by. She considered what she knew about the people of Midwood. They were generally a quiet bunch, committed to maintaining the beauty and peace of the town. And so the arson attack would not have been some mass act of destruction. There would have been no villagers with torches besieging the Zimmerman house. This was the act of one or two individuals. But who? Was
it motivated by fear or did some sadistic prick simply use the crisis as an opportunity to have a little fun? She had to find out. Now more than ever law had to prevail or else what would become of them? What she didn’t know, what she couldn’t have known, was that soon it would all be a moot point.
Chapter Five
Devil in Disguise
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
“His barking roused the bats… They wheeled and swooped in the darkness, their membranous wings sounding like small pieces of clothing – diapers, perhaps – flapping from a line in a gusty wind… Cujo became frightened. He didn’t like their scent or their sound; he didn’t like the odd heat that seemed to emanate from them.”
Stephen King, Cujo
In nearby Laurel Caverns, between Roland’s Dig and Durgoon Falls, there is a large subterranean chamber known as the Bat Room. It was empty. In early January that cave should have been full of hibernating bats. Yet the colony was gone. They were the latest victims of “white-nose syndrome” — a contagious fungus that strikes them when their immune systems shut down for winter. According to a theory devised by scientists (known as the “Itch and Scratch Hypothesis”), the fungus disturbs the bats’ hibernation, driving them out into the cold, the snow, and the daylight to spread the disease. And this year, it drove them out into the world of New Rabies. Through contact with other animals, the colony soon picked up this second infection. The two illnesses, working in tandem, drove them on and they bit every warm-blooded creature they encountered along the way. They attacked as they sickened and died. They bit even as their wings, thinned by the fungus, tore like tissue paper.
