by Beth Hersant
Louella’s reaction was immediate. A skillet came hurtling out of the kitchen door and clanged onto the frozen earth at his feet. “Listen up, you little bastard, you do not mistreat my people or my animals.”
Wyn appeared beside her at the kitchen door. He was trying hard to get himself back under control and his voice still trembled with rage. “Her wing’s broken, but I can fix it.”
Owen said shakily, “See, she’ll be all right.”
“Yeah,” Lou nodded, “but she isn’t going to lay tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. How many mouths do we have to feed? You know what?” She handed him the bag of provisions. “I’ve changed my mind. You’ll do great on the road. Get out.”
“What?”
“You heard me, get the hell out.”
“But you said that if I left here I’d die. If you do this, it’s murder.”
“Nope. It’s suicide. Because if you can be handed all of this,” Louella gestured wildly at the farmyard, “and still manage to fuck it up, then you have no one to blame but yourself. Now git!”
And with that he found himself outside, clutching a bag of food and the keys to his ancient Volkswagen with its half tank of gas. He stood there, the loneliest man in the world, and admitted to himself that he had no idea how to get home. And he had no idea how to fit in here. And he had nowhere in this world to go.
Meanwhile, Louella had a quiet word in Fletcher’s ear. “Take a rifle, head up to the scaffolding and cover him. Make sure nothing gets near him, ok?”
“Is this part of your plan?”
“Yep.”
“You are one crazy-ass broad.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said as she stooped to clean up the mess.
“I’m sorry, Lou,” Niamh helped her tidy up.
“Your boyfriend’s a real asshole,” Peg said as she chipped in.
“I’ll go talk to him.”
“Niamh, with all due respect, whether you patch up your relationship is secondary to whether or not I let him back in here,” Louella said quietly.
“Seriously?”
Lou filled a bucket with soapy water. There was so much food on the floor that it needed a good mopping. “You ever read any zombie novels?”
“No.”
“They’re interesting. All about surviving at the end of the world. In them there’s usually some idiot who works against the group. I’m not wasting time with that. We’ve got too much to do. We have to work on this place, defend it, raise the crops, tend the animals, raise the kids, and sort out this vaccine business — all while trying not to go nuts. We don’t have time to argue with an asshole. He toes the line or he’s out.”
Dusk fell and still Owen remained. He sat in his car, turning it on periodically so he could get a little heat. Louella had seen, well actually heard, of this happening before. Her father was rebellious during his younger years and after one particularly nasty argument with his dad, he had been told to hit the road. He made it as far as the mailbox. There he realized that he had precisely nowhere to go and still he could not swallow his pride enough to go back to the house. In the end, it was his mother who broke the stalemate.
Dinner at the farm that night was hamburgers and Louella wrapped two of them up and went out to Owen’s car. She hopped into the passenger seat and handed him a burger.
“I just want to go home,” his voice was thick; he sounded bunged up like he’d been crying.
“You know I would help you if I thought it wouldn’t get you killed.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. I’m just …”
“What?”
“I’m just so angry all the time.”
“It’s not surprising. It’s the apocalypse and that’s a tad upsetting,” she said dryly.
“It isn’t just the outbreak. You guys have each other. I can’t turn around without tripping over somebody and yet I’ve never felt so alone.”
“You know, if you spoke to them a little nicer, shared the work a bit more, you’d have them too. No one here wants to see you isolated, but we don’t know how to get close to you.”
“I’ve been wondering if I’m just too different. I’m from a big city and you …”
“Are from a ‘podunk hell right out of Deliverance’?” She laughed and bit into her burger. “None of that matters anymore. Republican or Democrat, Black or White, gay or straight, town mouse or country mouse — who cares? We’re just trying to survive.” She paused while she formulated the idea in her head. “Actually, we can do more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have an opportunity to really do something here. We’ve got such a good set up, the sort of place survivors will gravitate to. And we can make a sustainable life for them, but we’ll need to establish some sort of … I don’t know … society to do it.”
“Establish a society?” he laughed. “Look, I’ll admit that the group’s doing well, but we’re not exactly a bunch of George Washingtons and Ben Franklins.”
“I’ve got the gray hair and dentures.” She smiled at him and shrugged. “I’m just saying that if we want a future, we’re going to have to build one. You’re pre-law, aren’t you?”
The question threw him. “I was a Political Science major and, yeah, I was going into law. Why?”
“Because I want you to start thinking about how we’re going to draft laws for this place. We need a constitution that sets out how decisions are made, how we’re going to function, what rights people have. We need to define what is and isn’t acceptable to the group and also establish how to replace a leader who’s become dangerous or ineffective.”
He looked at her for a long time. “Fuck me, you’re serious.”
“Don’t get me wrong — the law’s meaningless if we all starve to death or get overrun; so we still need a young man like yourself to help with the jobs. But while you work, this is something you can think about. It’s something that’ll challenge you and maybe take your mind off being so homesick. And it’s something that would make you indelibly one of us.”
“But why…,” Owen found himself getting flustered, “… after today. With the way you feel about me…”
“You have no idea how I feel about you. Yeah, we clashed today and you made me so freakin’ mad I could’ve …” Louella didn’t finish the sentence. “But I also posted guards to make sure you didn’t get hurt while you were outside the walls.”
“You did? I thought the guards were there to keep me out.”
“Nope, they’ve been watching out for you this whole time.” She turned to him. “You’ve made some mistakes. Join the club. The question is do you want to be the guy who storms out of here and is just a bad memory? Or do you want to be … I don’t know … the legislator for a new society?”
He stared at her in disbelief. He knew he’d behaved horrendously and a part of him was surprised that it had taken this long for the old woman to crack and finally kick his ass out. And yet here she was offering him a chance to reinvent himself, to become so much more than he ever dreamed. To do something important.
“All right, you’re on.” He felt a little giddy.
She got out of the car and he followed her. “I want you to draft the law, but keep it simple. The people here aren’t stupid, but no one is going to want to sit and read a lot of legalese. When you have a rough draft, I’m going to open it up to everyone to question and debate. That way they’ll all be involved in the process. When the amendments are made, we’ll all sign on to it.”
“All right. I’ll get started on it tonight.”
“After you apologize to Ginny’s family. There are a lot of ruffled feathers in there.” She smiled at him wryly. “You dirty rotten chicken-kicker.”
“I’m sorry, Lou.”
“It’s done.”
“And you really think that this is the start of a new wor
ld?”
Louella shrugged, “Why not? Human civilization didn’t begin in the cities. First came the hunters and then the farmers. Where else is it going to start if not with us?”
Chapter Eleven
Interlude
“None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.”
Mother Teresa
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
Helen Keller
If life on the farm was a movie, this is where the work montage would go. There’d be scenes of people rising to the challenge, innovating, prevailing. We’d see, for instance, Alec directing the building projects and laboring in the noonday sun — shirtless, sweat glistening on his muscles — while Joe Esposito sings You’re the Best in the background. We’d see the group engaged in weapons training — they’d start off clumsy, a band of misfits with no hope. But to the synthesized momentum of Survivor’s The Moment of Truth, they’d improve until they became frankly awesome with even Louella’s round frame capable of ninja-like prowess. Bananarama’s It Ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It would make a perky accompaniment as Niamh and Peg hit the books or you could just accompany all of it with Roxette’s Stars to underscore their sense of hope.
The reality is always different. Alec, dressed in filthy jeans and a flannel shirt, was freezing his ass off every day as he worked on the fortifications. To the left side of the house there was a paved area with three outbuildings: a storage building (now a pig sty), a tractor shed and a grain silo. He’d already plugged the gaps between these with security fencing and now he planned to extend the fence to the right side of the house to give the cattle more free-range pasture to graze. Then he’d build guard towers — elevated firing positions to counter attacks coming from any direction.
Normally, he found work therapeutic. The most relaxing thing in his life had always been to work outside with his hands. It was like that old saying: “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” But now, the stakes were so high. He was responsible for creating a safe haven for everyone and therefore he worked like a fiend. It was Mae, most of all, who drove him. The five-year-old had been so pale with brown shadows under her eyes; she talked less, laughed less. But with each addition he made to their defenses, she slept better. And the color was returning to her cheeks as her dad built her “a castle” to keep her safe.
Likewise, Fletcher was obsessed with the security of the base. He’d read a lot of history books while researching one of his novels and hence had a wealth of ideas on how to protect the farm. The difficulty for him lay in the tension between compassion and logic. Take, for instance, Francis Galton’s survival handbook for Victorian explorers, The Art of Travel. In it Galton describes how to make “pitfalls.” These were small holes dug into the ground with sharpened stakes embedded at the bottom. They could then be camouflaged on top to look like the surrounding turf. The idea was to dot these holes randomly all around the farm; that way if the infected approached, they would likely run afoul of the traps. Just stepping into one of those holes was probably enough to break a man’s ankle, but Fletch meant to truly hobble them. Hence, he recommended that the wooden spikes be baked in hot ashes. Apparently that would keep them strong and sharp despite seasonal wear and tear. If the infected managed to yank themselves free of the stakes (and, let’s face it, they’d sure as hell try), then they would be slowed down as they crossed “the killing field” — the bare ground between the pit traps and the fences. In essence, they would be a lot easier to pick off.
All of that made logical sense. But to set those traps… The people most likely to step into them were his friends, people he’d known all his life, the Mareds and Effies of Midwood. He was under no illusion about the pain and damage he would cause and it kept him awake at night. While he prided himself on his talent and intellect, he felt — no he knew — that what must ultimately define a man was his compassion. And now he was … what? Actually recommending that they put hardened spikes in holes in the ground so that when Katie Boehler or the Mayor came trundling along, those stakes would punch up through the bottoms of their feet. Hell, if they hit it just right, the spikes could penetrate right up into the ankle. How the fuck had he changed from a man who would not throw a punch into this?
But it was a different world now and it was changing all of them. Louella was an old softie and she’d been forced to mow down two people just to get the kids out of town. If circumstances could turn the Louellas of this world into combatants, then it really was time for the gloves to come off. Still, those spikes …
He mentioned this to Peg and was disappointed when she did not have an immediate answer for him. She would only say, “I’ve been thinking about that. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
The following day, Patience split the group into two. One half would stand guard and keep to their tasks while the other had a training session. And then they’d swap. She was covering the main principles of retreat — how, if you had to run for it, you should not look back over your shoulder.
“You know they’re coming,” she said. “That’s not a fact that requires constant verification. And every time you look back, you take your eyes off where you’re going. Is there anything ahead that’ll trip you up? Are there more infected approaching from the front? To keep looking back is a fear response and it means that you are not concentrating on your goal. I’m going to keep drilling that into you because, if you have to run for your lives, you need to do it effectively. Any questions?”
Bib raised a hand — it’s funny how the old habits from school never die. “Where do we run to?”
“On every mission, we will designate a fallback position where we’ll meet up if things go sideways. Everyone will know at least three routes to get there. If there is a problem here and we have to evacuate, well, I’m going to talk to Louella about designating rendezvous points. And Lou was thinking about setting up a ‘Site B’.”
“What’s that?” Niamh asked.
“Another fortified, well-stocked location that we can retreat to if we lose the farm.”
There were no other questions and so Patience moved on. “In a minute, Niamh is going to talk us through first aid …”
Fletch cut in: “You mean whisky and duct tape?”
“But first,” Patience continued, “I want to turn things over to Peg.”
Everyone was confused by this. It was a defensive training session, so why was the cop handing it over to the librarian?
Peg answered that question with her first statement. “We need to talk about killing people.” They all gawked at her. “That is what all this training amounts to. To defend ourselves and the farm, we will have to shoot the infected and perhaps other survivors. And these are likely to be people we know.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table for this and she shuffled through the papers in front of her.
“This is an assessment of how New Rabies affects the human brain. It was submitted by Dr. Edwin Caldwell and a colleague posted it on the CDC website shortly before the internet went down. It reads:
I have spent a significant amount of time interviewing infected patients before they lost their capacity for speech. Without exception, they speak of their diminished mental faculties. They find that the virus erodes their memories. Not only do they forget significant people in their lives, but they also experience extreme difficulty in holding on to who they are. One patient remarked that the fever seemed to be “burning her out,” destroying her sense of identity and cauterizing her emotions in the process. It is true that emotional responses such as compassion, mercy and regret are wholly absent from patients once they have fully succumbed to the disease.
I believe that this mental destruction is a mechanism employed by the virus. Traditional rabies ramps up aggression in animals and makes them
more likely to bite and hence spread the disease. Likewise New Rabies also increases aggression while simultaneously attacking the areas of the brain responsible for memory and moral reasoning. In short, it turns its victims into vectors. It rids them of all impediments to violent action. Then it propels them out into the world to look for people to infect. Within nature this is not a new phenomenon. The virus’s only aim is survival and to survive, it must reproduce — in this case it must spread. To achieve this end, it reduces complex human beings to the level of puppets with the disease twitching their strings.
Some mental vestiges remain. Patients have been observed opening doors and using tools (such as sticks and rocks) to break windows. However, the similarity between the infected and the rest of humanity ends there. There is nothing left to reason with. No communication is possible. And they no longer possess a conscience that is capable of pity or remorse. We talk about zombies in movies and books. This virus has given us a medical example of what a zombie might be. While their cardiovascular functions continue unabated and hence they are technically “alive,” the person — the soul — is dead. What remains is an empty, and highly dangerous, husk.
“Dr. Edwin Caldwell was the lead investigator from the CDC assigned to the initial outbreak on Cáscara. He’s the one who managed to determine the nature of the disease and he gave us the name ‘New Rabies.’ Therefore, I believe it is safe to say that he was one of the few experts on the disease.”
“Was?” Bib asked.
“He was killed by the vectors on the island. In fact the whole team was lost. But this assessment,” she waved the paper at them, “is the word of one of the few authorities on the subject. So when he says that the infected have lost everything that made them human, that the person you knew and loved is dead and what is left is an empty shell, then you should believe it. If you have to shoot any of these husks, then understand it is not an act of murder. It’s an act of mercy.”
