by Jones, K. J.
“Even Hunter?” Peter asked.
Chris's seventeen-year-old son was more interested in cars, hunting, and girls than his parents' issues.
“Not a word. Calls, texts, nothing. My reserve weekend in Fayetteville coming up this weekend. They know that. I reminded them.”
The large US Army base Fort Bragg was in Fayetteville, about an hour and a half drive west from Wilmington. His kids were there, living with their mother and whoever was her newest guy.
When Chris was in Afghanistan, Amber left him. But she didn’t tell him. He returned and found her living with another man. Chris threw the man through the plate glass of a sliding door. Fortunately, the man was a soldier, and survived. The consequences and drama that ensued, in the end Chris went Reserves to finish his contract with the Army. It was better than Leavenworth. 75th Regiment Rangers high-ranking officers pulled strings, the only reason Chris wasn’t in prison for assault and attempted second degree homicide.
“You think she got Hunter into her game playing?”
“No,” answered Peter. “Hunter’s never cared. He doesn’t like his mother and, frankly, you either. No offence.”
“Nuh. He been talking a lot more with me since he wanted to be a Ranger.”
“That’s good.”
“He been training up himself. Going to the mountains.”
“Why did Crystal go to the mountains?”
“She need to learn to hunt.”
Chris's other child was Crystal, age fifteen. But she had stopped falling prey to her mother’s games a long time ago.
“Okay. But you have had this arrangement of seeing them every time you go to your warrior weekend,” Peter said mockingly. “They know the schedule. Every time, you go to some hoedown Southern country style vomit restaurant.” He imitated a long drawl Southern accent, “Where y'all get country style biscuits and pulled pork, swit tea, bar-bee-que, grits and collard greens.”
Chris chuckled deep in his chest, his wide shoulders shaking.
“Am I wrong?”
“That some dang good food, man. You don't know what you're missing.”
“Grits are things you should feed livestock.” He sipped his coffee.
“Damn Yankee.”
“Okay, redneck. What are we gonna do about this problem?” Peter pointed to the phone which had come to represent the problem.
“Let's get in my truck and go to Fayetteville and straighten this shit out.”
“I got plans today,” said Peter.
Chris scoffed. “Yeah? Doing what?”
“I do things.”
“Gotta go to the VA?”
“Maybe I'm going to mass.”
The Southern Baptist knew what Catholic mass was solely due to Peter. “Y'all Catholics got service on Mondays?”
“We got mass every day.”
“A lot of churching.” A pull on his beer. “You going to your mass?”
“No.”
“Didn't think so. Where you going?”
“Maybe to look for a job.”
“When have you worked a job outside the Army, son?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Where ya really going?”
“You’re really nosey.” Finish with that cup, Peter got up and poured another.
“What happened to Matt?” Chris asked.
“What do you mean?”
“He said he needed to go talk to his minister and go back to VA therapy.”
“It’s Matt. He likes doing things like that.”
“Nobody likes VA therapy.”
“He’s a medical person,” said Peter. “They get wet when they get to be the patient.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Ain’t doctors the worst patients?”
“He’s not a doctor. How would either of us know about doctors? You’re the only one in your family to graduated high school.”
“Your daddy’s a lawyer.”
“He’s a criminal defense lawyer,” said Peter. “A doctor would have to murder his patients for my dad to know him. Thinking such a guy wouldn’t be a good example of the medical profession.”
“Hear about Mazy?” Chris asked. “The shooting.”
“Jimbo called me. I saw in online too, the CCTV. I’d shoot him to death, too.”
“They gonna suspend her for the investigation?”
“He said they’re too short-staffed right now. Shit’s too crazy. And there’s been another one since Mazy’s blasting of the Wilmington Zombie.”
“Another?”
“Yeah. Do you know Sergeant Brown, big black guy, used to be a Marine D-I at Parris Island?” DI stood for drill instructor.
“Scary motherfucker, yeah.”
“Blasted a sixteen-year-old white girl.”
“Dang.”
“She was stark naked.”
“Aw, hell.”
“So he tried to keep his distance to get a female cop there, ya know.”
“Smart.”
“Officer Johnson shows up. Ever met her?”
“No.”
“Single mother. One of those black women who doesn’t take shit from nobody and calls everybody ‘honey.’ Girl attacks her. Locks on in a bite on her arm. Brown does the LAPD clubbing thing to get her off of Johnson. No response. He resorts to blowing her away.”
“Dang! All these shootings. I didn’t hear nothing on the news.”
Peter shrugged. “Guess it’ll be the late edition.”
“But I did see on the news about that shit that went down only a few streets from my house. Man! Your Mexican hombre’s Indian friend – “
“You mean Julio’s Native American friend Ben Raven?”
“Whatever. He got to snipe two men. Crazy ass black guy. And this white guy, oh shit. I saw it on streaming. It got pulled from YouTube for violent content.”
“Yeah,” said Peter. “I know about YouTube’s censorship.”
“It gone viral before they could pull it. Man!” Chris’s big fist hit the tabletop, shuttering Peter’s coffee cup via impact. “That was some crazy shit. Dude attacking cops left and right. He looked messed up, too. Talk about pulling some LAPD. They were steady hitting him. Bunch of ‘em. Then Raven blew the side of his head out. Whop! Dead where he stood. Oh, the kid was there.”
“The kid?”
“Yeah. Gleason.”
“Matt, you mean?” asked Peter.
“Whatever.”
“Are you pissed at him or something?”
“No. Why should I be?”
“Nothing. Never mind. This incident would explain why he wants to go to VA therapy.”
Chris’s shoulders shrugged. “Guess. Where ya going today?”
“The gun range, you moron.”
“Why you making it such a mystery?”
“Thought I’d go to the gym after.”
“You ain’t supposed to be fighting, Sul.” He drained his beer and got up. From the refrigerator, he said, “You fuck up that leg more, you end up a cripple.”
“What are you talking about? They said I’d be a cripple for life as it was. It was all me that got me walking right. And Julio.”
“Come on. We'll go to Fayetteville, then hit a strip bar. Get dressed.”
Peter cocked his eyebrow. “Didn’t I used to out rank you? Order you around.”
“I’m older than you. Get dressed, man.”
“Fucking reta’d.” No R in retard in the Bostonians pronunciation.
“Come on. I’ll teach your Yankee ass how to pronounce words right on the way.”
“Oh, you got some nerve. You need subtitles when you speak, Southerner.”
2.
It was all over the news, a Wilmington female police officer shot a homeless cannibal. This story pushed out the black man and cop-attacking white man story.
Syanna announced at the breakfast table that she knew the female cop through Matt.
“Ma, I know it’s on the news,” Phebe said into the speaker phone as she
drove to campus.
“That place isn’t safe. You need to come home.”
“Oh, yeah, because New York is the hub of all safety.”
“Don’t smart mouth me, miss. We don’t have cannibals, Phebe Terresa.”
Phebe hated it when people used her middle name.
“Maybe you should learn to use a gun, sweetheart.”
“No, I’ll be fine. Syanna has a gun. That’s enough for one household.”
As she drove, she spotted an African American man walking the sidewalk, wearing a sandwich sign. It read: The End is Near. After then the words were too small to read from a car. Words filled the whole sign, right to the edges. Some appeared in the pattern of Biblical passages.
“I’ll be fine, Ma. I’m on campus. I gotta go.”
“Love you, Pheebs. Be safe. Please.”
“I will. Bye.”
Wednesday, big day for covering classes. But when she went to the secretary’s office, it was closed. A sign taped to the door told her the department head had cancelled all anthropology classes due to the H1N3 pandemic. That was weird. And unfortunate. Loss of pay. But it did give more time for thesis research.
She set off for the library, determined that if anything weird happened on the way, she’d ignore it. She hadn’t told her mom about the girl on the Commons on Monday, since nothing happened on Tuesday. Her mom would have kittens and fly down to Wilmington to retrieve her. Being twenty-eight was no excuse in Colleen Marcelino’s eyes for all this out-of-state independence. Phebe left New York at eighteen.
3.
Matt Gleason took a seat next to Mustache Rick.
“No, Dad,” Matt said into his phone. “I know you saw the cannibal footage. And the other thing. But, Dad, I survived wars. I think I can handle myself here. The meeting’s starting. Give my love to Mom. Bye bye.”
“How’s the folks at the homestead?” Rick asked him.
“They’re not used to drugs.” He slipped his phone away.
“In this nation?”
“Rural Wyoming. Gotta go into Cheyenne to see drugs. They don’t do that often.”
Their supervisor took the front. “Okay, folks. I’m getting a lot of complaints about not enough protective gear. Masks, gloves, and eye protections are the CDC prescribed personal protection gear for an influenza outbreak.”
A man in the front raised his hand, but then didn’t wait to be called on. “What about when they try to bite us?”
Nods and uh-huhs circulated among the group.
“What does the CDC have to say about that?”
“Drug usage is not contagious,” said the supervisor.
“They’re still saying this is drugs? Last shift, we took down a six-year-old child. Shift before then, it was a seventy-eight-year-old. The man attacked me and tried to rip out my throat, then had a heart attack in my arms. Am I supposed to believe they were taking this new street drug? What is really happening here?”
“Look, I’m telling y’all all I know.”
“We need permission to wear more protective gear. Things to protect our arms, like the cops are asking for.”
“The same cops that shot unarmed people yesterday?”
“How can you blame her,” Mustache Rick voiced up. “He was eating another man. I would have shot him to death too.”
“Or the naked white girl,” a black paramedic said.
“Or that guy who attacked all those cops,” a white female paramedic said. “This whole thing that they don’t feel any pain. We feel pain. And I sure as hell do not want to be bitten by one. They like to bite.”
Matt cleared his throat. He rarely spoke up at meetings. “Is there any way, sir, that we aren’t being told the truth about this is.” They all looked at him for a moment, then turned their attention to the supervisor for the answer.
“God, Matt, I hope that’s not what’s happening. The CDC is trustworthy. They’re upstanding.”
“But they are a government agency, who must obey orders from above, even if it goes against everything they believe in and swore to uphold. It happens a lot more than you’d think when your paycheck’s from Uncle Sam.”
“Why would anyone do that, Matt?”
“Fear of panic. Look, we had three cases of Ebola in the entire United States and people were freaking out like Ebola was on their doorstep and the Bubonic plague had returned to kill half the population. Swine flu, they were demanding the borders be closed. And this H1N3, they lost their minds when it started. Christmas was insane. It’s a highly hysterical population. If there’s a virus burning out of control and instead of the sick falling down and going into a bed, they get up, run around and bite, people in this country would lose their shit times ten. I’m from a rural area. I’ve seen animals infected with rabies, sir. These people sure are acting like some kind of furious stage of rabies.”
“Rabies doesn’t do this in humans,” the supervisor pointed out.
“I know that, sir. But maybe it’s new.”
“Well, let’s not make hysteria in this room.”
As Matt suited up in the locker room, he placed an inch layer of newspaper under his sleeves and duct taped it together.
“Just in case,” he said to Mustache Rick, sitting beside him on the bench.
“Good idea, man.”
4.
Phebe drove through her middle-class neighborhood, made up mostly of one-story ranch-style houses. Scraggly grass grew on the lawns with large patches of sand breaking through. Some yards decorated with tall ornamental grasses.
She reached her street. Her rental was among a row of identical, cheaply constructed two-story houses. Hers was at the corner.
She pulled into the driveway, parking behind Rebecca's car. Getting out of the little blue Honda, she instantly heard the neighbor's Jack Russell terrier barking his head off from behind her house.
She entered home. Quiet and peaceful. Familiar scents greeted her. Rebecca's school bag still leaned against the couch. Into the kitchen, the analog clock ticked the seconds. Phebe took out a bottle of white wine from the fridge and a glass. Then poured orange juice for the sick girl. She checked her phone as she went up the stairs.
At the top of the staircase was the bathroom. She turned down the hall. Syanna's open bedroom door came up on the left and her own bedroom on the right. Rebecca's room was next.
Gently knocking, “Becks? It's Pheebs. You awake?”
No answer, so she gently opened the door. The room was cheerfully decorated, lots of Paris stuff, everything neat as a pin. Its occupant slept, wrapped in a comforter drawn up over her shoulders like a burrito. Phebe tiptoed in and put the glass on her nightstand. She had to nudge over things to make room. Over-the-counter herbal flu medicine, herbal throat lozenges, and herbal immunity boosters crowded the nightstand.
A limb would have to fall off Rebecca before she took a non-herbal drug. Mademoiselle Pure Body was the natural food store's favorite customer.
Last spring semester, it took her father coming down from Richmond, Virginia to make her go to the doctor to get rabies shots. A cat had bitten her hand. The cat had been on their small back deck, acting very weird. It forced itself behind their little grill. Rebecca tried to help it, and it lunged at her, biting her hand. Their neighbor, Mr. Monroe, shot the cat. Its body then had to be brought to her treating doctor and sent to an epidemiologist for confirmation of rabies. Phebe read up on it. They’d have to cut off the cat’s head and open its skull cavity to dissect its brain and look for Negri bodies, which apparently looked like pepper sprinkles. These bodies only occurred about sixty percent of the time but were the most definitive way to diagnose rabies. It was otherwise almost impossible to firmly diagnose the virus, in animal or human.
Phebe went to her room at the back of the house. Through closed windows and drawn blinds, she heard the yappy dog. His name was Pookie. Mr. Monroe got him a couple of months ago. Her window overlooked his fenced-in backyard. Unfortunate for her.
On her phone, she
searched for what music she wanted to listen to. Outside, she heard the big bark of Glitzy, a chocolate lab from a couple of houses down. She woofed as if she told Pookie to shut the hell up. The yapper remained silent for a few minutes. But then he resumed.
The front door opened and closed. Syanna's voice. “Ladies, I'm home.”
Phebe called, “I'm up here.”
“Howdy howdy,” Syanna cheerfully said as she bounced up the stairs. She held the doorframe and leaned in. “How's the plague girl?”
“Still being sickly.”
Five foot two Syanna Lynn stepped into the room with platform shoes that gave her nearly five inches more height. They hurt Phebe’s feet just looking at them.
Syanna picked up a book that sat on top of an overstuffed bookshelf. Leafing through, she said, “Should we start the funeral arrangements?”
“Think yellow bunting?”
“She'd like that.”
They smiled to each other on how bad they were.
“You going to kickboxing tonight?” Syanna asked.
“Doubt it. You?”
Syanna sat on her bent leg at the foot of the bed. “Not feeling it. They all got the plague. I'm not liking these odds.” She flopped the book down.
Phebe looked at a digital clock on the nightstand. “Why are you home so early?”
“Classes are canceled, sugar.”
“Why?”
“Honey. The violence on campus,” she said in such a no-duh way.
“What happened?”
“You must have left before it all went down. There were about six students on Zombie. It was like being caught in a half-naked, stoned, pissed off chimpanzee mosh pit.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse. Biting people. Hitting people. Screaming. Every one of them dressed inappropriately. Like that girl the other day. Like they just got out of bed. Some worse. There were penises and breasts exposed.”
“Oh, it’ll definitely be on Twitcher then.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Twitcher banned the shit.”
“Already? Didn’t it just happen?”
