Flypaper: A Novel

by Chris Angus

  “Given their advanced technology and, presumably, intelligence,” said Gordon quietly, “I suppose you could say that, at least in relation to us, they are basically intolerant gods.” He looked at Littlefield. “Wasn’t it one of your arguments, Paul, that the epidemic was God’s way of cleansing humanity of its impurities? Something that needed doing periodically? I fail to see much difference between that and what the aliens are doing to us.”

  “God would not forsake us in such a manner,” Littlefield said, his eyes filled with pain.

  “Maybe He’s just not there, Paul. Maybe He was never there. Maybe the creators of the oval were the only God we ever had.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Keene Valley

  AFTER A WEEK together in Elwood’s small cabin, the group had established a routine and a division of duties. Each day, Elwood and Alford would go hunting for their ever-growing larder. Sarah spent considerable time organizing the root cellar and also using blankets to divide up the limited space so everyone had some privacy. She and Amelia would then go hunting for berries, wild mushrooms, wild apples, or cranberries. Soon, they had jars of jam and pies to supplement their meals.

  Every afternoon before supper one or more of them would hike down to the maple tree with the binoculars to see if they could determine how things were going in town. What they saw was not promising.

  For the first few days, there were many sick people on the road. They frequently saw fights break out and on several occasions heard gunfire. One afternoon they discerned the sounds of a virtual pitched battle. Some sort of demarcation line had been formed and two factions appeared to be fighting it out.

  “It’s right strange,” said Elwood. “None of the sick I saw looked able enough to actually carry on an organized fight like that.”

  “Maybe the fight is between healthy looters and the poor folks still trying to barricade themselves in,” said Alford.

  But the battle eventually petered out, and they couldn’t tell what the outcome might have been. After a few more days, the numbers of sick on the road began to dissipate until finally all that could be seen were dead bodies that soon disintegrated.

  In the evening they all sat together in Elwood’s tiny living space before the fire. By the light from oil lamps, they played chess or checkers, read from Elwood’s substantial collection of books, and listened briefly to the radio. Almost every night, the number of stations still broadcasting diminished.

  On one of these evenings, they sat listening to Sarah read passages from Thoreau’s Walden. Amelia lay curled in Alford’s lap. Elwood was sewing a pair of his old pants. Suddenly, Alford interrupted his wife.

  “Amelia seems awful warm,” he said, with a hand to her forehead.

  Sarah came over at once and felt her. “Why, she’s burning up.” Her face grew suddenly fearful. Not wanting to alarm Amelia, who nevertheless seemed listless and unconcerned, Sarah tried to keep control of her emotions as they put her to bed, where the girl fell into a fitful sleep. They withdrew to the living area.

  “What if she’s got the disease?” Sarah asked in a haunted voice.

  “None of the rest of us have any symptoms,” said Alford. “If anything, we’ve been closer to those devils than she ever was. Maybe it’s something else.”

  “Do you have anything for the fever, Elwood?” asked Sarah.

  Elwood looked guilty. “I’m sorry, Sarah. It’s somethin’ I jest never thought about. I never been sick a day in my life.”

  “We’ve got to do something!” she cried.

  “First light,” Elwood said, “I’ll go into town. There hasn’t been any movement down there for several days. Maybe they’ve moved on. I’ll see if there’s anythin’ left at the drugstore.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Alford.

  Elwood shook his head. “We can’t both go and leave Sarah and Amelia alone. It’s my fault for not havin’ anything here. I’ll go.”

  By morning, Amelia had fallen into a deep sleep, but her skin was frightfully pale, and her face was still hot to the touch, even though Sarah continuously applied cold facecloths. It was maddening not to know if she might have the terrible disease or to be able to go to a hospital. Elwood took one last look at the child, then picked up his gun and went out.

  He moved quietly through the woods, down to the bank of the river, but then decided not to take the canoe. Out on the water, he was too visible. Instead, he kept to the ground he was most familiar with, his beloved forest. He could slip through the trees like an Indian, and in this silent manner, he approached the village.

  He moved through backyards and behind brushy stands of alder, keeping to the less traveled areas as much as possible. He finally reached the small park in the center of town without having seen a soul.

  It was bizarrely quiet. There seemed to be no one left, though he saw many bodies, most of which had decayed until only a few pitiful remnants remained. He feared the bodies might still be contagious and avoided getting any closer to them than necessary.

  From the park, he could see Warner’s Drugstore. The front door was wide open. That was definitely not a good sign. Clutching his rifle, he walked openly to the store. The inside of the building was a shambles. Shelves and cabinets had been pulled open or toppled over, the contents spread about. Little of value remained. It was as though the residents of an asylum had ransacked the store.

  He picked through everything, but there were no medicines. Exasperated, he went back outside and stood looking down the deserted main street. What was he going to do?

  There was only one solution. He’d go house-to-house looking for the things he needed. The first two houses were similarly ransacked. They also contained bodies that had decayed in the manner of the sickness. In one home, a near-skeleton sat in a rocking chair, mouth wide open, as though mocking the madness in front of its empty eye sockets.

  After finding similar scenes in house after house, he despaired of ever discovering the medicines they needed. Finally, in an out-of-the-way little alley between buildings in the heart of downtown, he saw a barricaded door that didn’t appear to have been broken open. It took considerable effort to force his way in, where he found a staircase that led to a small apartment on the second floor. There, he found two more bodies, but these had not died from the disease. Instead, it appeared the couple had committed joint suicide in the face of the terrible fate they were sure awaited them.

  In the apartment’s little bathroom, he finally struck gold. A medicine cabinet brimmed with a variety of prescription bottles. There was Tylenol! Thank the Lord. And several kinds of painkillers. There were sleeping pills, vitamins, Band-Aids, iodine, and much more. He took a pillowcase from a pile of neatly folded sheets and swept everything into it.

  On his way out, he took a quick look around and found many useful items. There were some canned goods to supplement what they already had, boxes of matches, candles, some warm winter clothing. Everything went into the pillowcase until it was bulging and he could carry no more.

  Then he slipped back outside and again keeping to the backyards and alleyways, made his way home. Sarah and Alford welcomed him with cries of relief and gratitude. Alford, especially, had felt guilty and terribly worried for his elderly friend.

  When they dumped the contents of the pillowcase out on the floor, there were many exclamations of wonder. Sarah immediately took the Tylenol and gave some to Amelia. Then they settled back to wait fitfully to see if their little girl might somehow survive what had so far killed most of the people on the planet.

  Logan and Diana found a secluded corner of the library and were trying to get some rest. With almost thirty souls in the admittedly spacious room, however, privacy was a matter of degree. Still, they lay in each other’s arms, unable to sleep, speaking in low voices.

  “I can’t stop seeing Duncan’s face,” Diana said. “It was so filled with fear. He wasn’t the best person in the world, but no one deserves to die like that.”

  Logan nodd
ed. “I suppose none of them did, not even Huang.”

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

  He looked at her soberly. “Was it really bad in Urumqi?”

  She grimaced. “It’s hard to explain. I’m not sure it’s something men can ever really comprehend. To Huang, I really was just a piece of ‘fucking meat’ as Leeanne so delicately put it. Every moment I was with him, he was trying to touch me, trying to figure out some way to make me vulnerable. It was like being under constant attack and having to figure out a defense for every conceivable situation. It was really, really awful.” She squeezed him and murmured her contentment. “One thing I did was try to imagine it was your hand that rested on my thigh, that it was you sitting beside me in the car or waiting for me in that awful tent. But it didn’t work, you know. Nothing worked except getting away from him. I can honestly say I don’t feel one iota of regret that he’s dead.”

  He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Talk about it if it helps. But if it doesn’t, let’s just try to put it out of our minds.”

  “Yes! That’s what I want. I don’t know how much time we have left in this insane, bloody world, but I sure as hell don’t want to waste another minute of it talking about Huang.” She snuggled in closer and held onto him tightly. “What’s going to happen next, Eric?”

  He took a deep breath, feeling the tension of the last few hours slip away, enjoying the feel of her body molded to his. “I’m not sure. We can’t survive here for long. For one thing, we only have a little food and water. Xuemin says regardless of what that treacherous monk told Huang and Duncan, there’s no other way out of the caves that he’s aware of. That means we’re going to have to go back.”

  She sat up and stared at him. “You’re serious?”

  “The monastery is everything, Diana. It represents safety, shelter, a food source. It’s remote and off the beaten track. Assuming we’re not already infected, it’s going to be essential to our long-term survival.”

  “But the dead are all over the place, outside the walls, in the courtyard, in the halls. How can we possibly go back?”

  “I don’t know how. I only know it’s what we must do. Winter comes early in these mountains, and it can be unforgiving. We can’t leave unless and until we receive some word the epidemic is over. We need the monastery or we won’t survive the winter. It’s that simple.”

  They heard movement and then Marcia’s head peered over the bench Logan had turned on its side in order to provide some privacy.

  “There you are,” she rasped. “I wondered where you lovebirds had got to.”

  “For God’s sake, Marcia,” said Diana. “What’s a girl got to do to spend some quality time alone with her man?”

  “Go to a movie?” Kessler laughed in her sandpaper voice, puffing a cloud of smoke at them.

  “What do you want, Marcia?” Logan asked, irritably.

  “It’s not me. Gaoming is looking for you. He and one of his men rappelled down the cliff into the cavern.”

  “What!” Logan got to his feet. “Is he mad?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Gaoming coming up beside Marcia.

  Diana threw up her hands. She stood up too, glaring at the intruders.

  “Our watch reported no movement for several hours,” Gaoming went on. “I decided to see what was happening. You’ll never guess what I found.”

  Logan looked at the young officer with exasperation. “For all you know you may have infected everyone.”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, we didn’t get any closer than we did during the fight in the courtyard. Hell, we were close enough during the battle to reach out a hand and touch them. I swear I felt the breath of one of those monsters on my face. If we were going to be infected, we already are.”

  “Well, what did you find?” asked Diana.

  “They’re all dead,” he replied. “But there’s something else.”

  They looked at him expectantly.

  “The bodies have deteriorated at an amazing rate.”

  “Logan,” Marcia interrupted, “when he told me I had to go see for myself.”

  “You went down there, too? What the hell ever happened to the chain of command?”

  But she wasn’t paying any attention to him. “It’s as if the disease has increased its rate of postmortem progression tenfold. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. The bodies are completely disintegrated.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you there’s nothing left but clothing and small piles of white bone ash where each one lay.” She stared at him defiantly, daring him to question her.

  Logan stared from Gaoming to Marcia and back again. “Come on,” he said. “This I’ve got to see.”

  The bodies were as Marcia and Gaoming had said. It looked eerily as though someone had spread out the day’s laundry to dry all over the cavern floor. Only when he got right up next to the bodies did Logan see the small, white ash piles, like spilled bits of laundry detergent.

  “I think I understand,” said Marcia. “They must have built a sort of cleansing agent into the whole process. That’s why the bodies disintegrate so rapidly. After all, they had no reason to want to destroy other living things, just the intelligent species that might someday be a threat to them. I’ll tell you something else . . .”

  “What?” asked Logan, still staring in disbelief at the piles of clothes strewn across the cave floor.

  “I bet the threat to us from these ash piles is nil.”

  “You’re saying we don’t have to worry about infection from them?”

  “That’s what I think. Of course, that may not do us any good, since we had contact when they were alive. Only time will tell if we’re infected or not.”

  “But you’re suggesting we can return to the monastery without worrying further about contamination?”

  She nodded.

  Logan looked at Gaoming. “All right, Gaoming and I will go back and see if the same thing has happened to all the bodies.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Diana.

  He knew better than to try to talk her out of it. Marcia declared she would go back and inform the others what was happening.

  What ensued next was one of the strangest journeys imaginable, back through the caverns, up the corridors and staircases and out into the courtyard of the monastery. Everywhere, they passed more piles of clothing and pitiful ash remains.

  The entire army of diseased and doomed attackers was gone.

  “We’ll have some cleaning up to do,” said Logan, “but I don’t see any reason why we can’t return here. In fact, I think we must.”

  The ghoulish task took the better part of a day. Everyone helped. If there was any further risk of contamination, it was one they would all share equally. No one wanted to be the last person alive anyway. Better to die together. The clothes and ash were shoveled into carts and wheeled out to one of the terraces where they were buried in a mass grave. When it was over, the monastery once again became their home. Xuemin returned to his room, and he and Marcia went back to work deciphering the scrolls and the symbols from the oval itself.

  There were only half a dozen monks left now, those who’d remained with Xuemin. Many had been killed in the battle or joined those traitorous few who had guided the attackers. But most had simply fled into the hills when the attack had come. Logan couldn’t blame them. They were simple aesthetes, wanting only to spend their days praying and working. The horror of open warfare was too much for most of them to face.

  The four women, Marcia, Leeanne, Yä Ling, and Diana, supervised the cleanup and removal of debris from the battle and assigned quarters for everyone. Only a dozen of Gaoming’s men were left, along with a mere handful of the students. All told, some thirty souls now inhabited a monastery designed for over a hundred. The food stores would be more than adequate for the coming winter.

  For his part, Logan took stock of weapons and defenses. He assigned watches and sent patrols out into the surr
ounding countryside to look for any more of the sick. None were found. At the end of the first week in their new home, an early snowstorm dropped over a foot of snow on the compound, blanketing its surrounding terraces and mountain slopes. For Diana, the snow acted as a kind of spiritual cleansing agent, washing away the last signs of where the bodies had deteriorated and giving her a sense of renewal.

  Through it all, they remained vigilant to any signs that the disease had penetrated their haven. The slightest cough, sneeze, or headache was examined in minute detail. Logan knew a fair amount of battlefield medicine and the monks were a font of herbal remedies. Every malady cleared and went away. By the end of the month, they felt confident they had somehow escaped the epidemic.

  Once every evening, Marcia took her satellite phone to the highest slope surrounding the monastery and spent an hour trying to contact someone . . . anyone. But the airwaves were empty. After a month of silence, they gathered in Logan and Diana’s room to discuss what it all meant.

  “It means everyone’s fucking dead!” said Leeanne.

  “I suppose that’s possible,” said Logan, “but it’s damn hard to accept that we’re the only survivors out of eight billion people.”

  “I suspect total annihilation was what the aliens intended if their little experiment failed,” said Marcia.

  “But everyone?” asked Diana. “I can’t believe there aren’t others out there somewhere. There are remote locations and groups all over the world. Scientists in Antarctica, Bushmen in Australia, remote Amazonian tribesmen, Eskimos. If we can still be alive and uninfected, then there must be others.”

  “Maybe,” said Alan. “Though the groups you mentioned, with the exception of the scientists, aren’t likely to have access to radios or satellite communications.”