He set up his hot-lights at the table along with the car’s windshield sunshade for a reflector. Again he did test shots without the dog. Then he stuffed her into the nerd shirt, set her on the chair, and put Dad’s glasses over her eyes. She sat there, her tongue lolling out, and he put a treat hidden at the bottom of the notebook to draw her eyes down. The day after tomorrow, he’d give her the same costume and place her in front of the refrigerator whiteboard reading two plus two equals five. Six shots later, Bleu Cheese had had seven treats and he had a winner of a picture. And a major need for breakfast.
For English afterwards, he carefully composed the caption and typed it in. Blue Cheese is ready for school! No. Bleu Cheese. The receptionist at the vet had used the French spelling for blue, and they kept it. Bleu Cheese loved going to the vet because she never remembered what happened there. Or maybe because they always treated her to the store afterwards and bought her a bone, so she thought about that rather than the needle. Looking at the dog as she licked the sofa, he suspected it was the former.
“Now what class do you have?” Mom asked.
“Mom, no one else is making kids do this,” Corbin replied.
“Really? Did you check in all of their houses?”
“But you’re watching television!”
“I’m watching the news! That is your class then. Watch the news with me and learn about this world.”
It was Sombra C, like it had been since early July. Corbin couldn’t even remember Sombra A, which had been all the way back in his freshman year and never made it out of Asia. It was a virus that jumped from pigs to the farmers taking care of them, the genes derived from a reassortment of human, avian, swine, and seal sources in origin. Most people hadn’t even known that seals got influenza. Corbin hadn’t. It was hard for him to follow the reporters trying to explain, and they didn’t look like they followed it themselves. So he had watched an online video of a scientist explaining it weeks ago.
The first piece of the puzzle was the Adari shore bird, which transmitted an influenza virus to the harbor seal. Bodies had washed onto the beaches of what looked like fully healthy seals, except that they were dead. Autopsies showed severe brain decay, much of the decomposition happening before death.
The virus mutated forty-three times from birds to seals. Somehow it transferred to wild boars, and from them to domestic pigs. That was a terrible thing. Pigs were very good at creating new flu strains. Herds in East Asia started dying, and then the virus jumped to humans. This was not a problem unless you lived in the immediate vicinity. Sombra A went from infection to death in twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and it was difficult to pass from human to human. So it never carried beyond the region where it originated, and Corbin as a freshman at Cloudy Valley High never even heard of it.
Then it changed to Sombra B, which nailed him junior year. His fever was so high that he’d had a hallucination of swimming in his bed. Time and time again, he did the backstroke into his pillow. A great weight landed on his belly and forced him under the water, and that was Bleu Cheese. Mom came in with no hair and he cried, thinking that her breast cancer was back, but her hair was only tucked in a beige-colored knit cap. He made her take it off. Her scan had been clear for years, and it needed to stay that way. The day of her surgery, the volunteer nurse kept inviting Corbin and his father to the waiting room’s magazines. But they weren’t soothed or distracted by reading. Sombra B had Corbin hallucinating of that waiting room after Mom wore the cap.
It was only two really bad days, and the rest of it he just lay in bed feeling hot and dizzy, with a vague rattle of phlegm in his nose and lungs. Zaley sat in a nimbus of light by his bed, moving her long blonde hair off the pages of his Quest for Knowledge magazine as she read. That had been sweet of her. Sally would have been jealous of the virus. She picked through his magazines on her visits and asked why he cared about such boring stuff.
At a scream from the television, Corbin returned his focus to the news. Sombra B had just been a crappy cold, and now there was the far deadlier Sombra C. The scream had been from a group of people protesting outside the Portland confinement point. They were holding up signs about human rights violations and pictures of their missing loved ones. Mom sighed, beads ticking together as she made a bracelet on her lap table. “This is not a human rights violation.”
“Even if they’re being locked up against their will?” Corbin asked. Bleu Cheese flopped down between their chairs, her muzzle wet from her water bowl.
“What choice do they have?” Mom asked. “These people go mad in their last weeks. Think of how much damage that Patient Zero did! Of course he did not mean to, but he was no longer in control of his good sense.”
As she spoke, Patient Zero flashed on the screen. Corbin was familiar with that smiling face. Caucasian, twenty-eight, a bachelor’s degree in English from Senner College, Ford Looper was a substitute teacher who lived near Denver, Colorado. He shared an apartment with his unnamed girlfriend, the living room sofa occupied by an also unnamed and unemployed male friend. Ford had had Sombra B in February. A fit and healthy guy, he’d thrown it off in less time than Corbin had.
In late May, Ford was ill again. It appeared to be a milder version of Sombra B, although it couldn’t have been. People didn’t get Sombra B twice. He took himself off the substitute call list to stay home in bed. Feeling better by day four, he went on about his life. Work, bowling, and presumably sex with his girlfriend since she came down with that mild fever and malaise herself about a week after his initial symptoms started. Then the roommate came down with it. Only a shock jock was indiscreet enough to suggest that the girlfriend was banging him on the side. Or Ford was.
When the channel went to commercial, Corbin got out his laptop. He typed in Ford Looper, pulled up the article on his favorite online encyclopedia, and clicked Audio Read. The female voice was mostly a monotone, but Corbin never minded. He could spend two hours lost in the words on this page, or understand them in ten minutes and move on without frustration. Bleu Cheese farted and looked behind her in surprise.
On the last day of school before summer vacation, Ford was called in for a half-day job and never showed. His girlfriend found him sitting in the car, unable to remember how to start it. He had been there for an hour and a half contemplating his key and the ignition. Thinking he’d had a stroke, she drove him to the hospital. It was day eleven since infection, and for most of it, he’d felt fine. The ER doctor did some quick neurologic tests, which Ford passed, and he responded correctly to most questions. It was disturbing the questions he missed, basic stuff like the name of the president. The doctor said it was probably just low blood sugar, or depression. He wrote out a prescription for an SSRI and sent Ford home.
Then it was day twelve for Ford, day six for his girlfriend, and day three for the roommate. Ford began taking his drugs. His girlfriend noticed his spacey behavior over the next three days, starting soup on the stove and forgetting it, unable to answer a call on his cell phone. He watched his favorite sitcom but didn’t laugh at any of the jokes. Bright light was making him blink in discomfort. His gait changed a little, like his knees were stiff. She did not take him back to the hospital. They didn’t have health insurance as it was, and the first ER trip cost $800 that they didn’t have. She researched his medication on the Internet and concluded he was going through an adjustment period to it.
As for herself, she felt fine. She worked as a dental hygienist. On her day nine, a child bit her while having his teeth cleaned. It was a nasty bite, piercing the glove and blood getting all over the child and the girlfriend. Another hygienist cleaned up the mess while the dentist himself drove the girlfriend to the hospital for stitches. She landed the same ER doctor, who patched her up and said to bring Ford by. The change in gait worried him, as did the emotional blunting and discomfort at light. Maybe a different SSRI would be more appropriate.
The roommate slept with a prostitute.
The sex was unprotected, and no one could
figure out where an unemployed dude who slept on a sofa got the money. It was suspected he stole it from Ford. The prostitute worked all through her light fever and malaise. The child from the dentist’s office also came down with a fever. The hygienist who cleaned the blood did not, as she wore gloves. The mode of transmission was not known, but one of the child’s siblings also came down with a fever. It was a suspected biting, as this child had a long history of biting both students and teachers at his kindergarten and daycare.
The girlfriend did not bring Ford to the hospital that evening, or the next day. It was hotly debated whether it was to save cash or she was no longer capable at the time. Some who believed it was to save money condemned her, and were then attacked by others who said they wouldn’t have gone either. Ford and his girlfriend had college and credit card debt, a car repair in May wiped out their discretionary funds, they had a whopping ER bill and couldn’t take on another one. It was not the girlfriend’s fault. Other people blamed the ER doctor. He was new and inexperienced and made the wrong call. The medical profession defended him hotly. When someone came in with Ford’s symptoms, the first assumption was not an illness that had never existed until now. People pilloried the roommate, too. But being sleazy wasn’t the point. He hadn’t known he was infected. So many fingers were pointing in so many directions for something that was nobody’s fault.
Calls to the apartment from the dentist’s office went unanswered when the girlfriend did not appear for her shifts. By the time the cops showed up for a wellness check on a mid-June afternoon, it was Ford’s day twenty, the girlfriend’s day fourteen, and the roommate’s day eleven. Or it would have been those days for the latter two, were they still alive.
When the cops saw the blood through a parting in the curtains and broke down the door, a naked Ford exploded onto the porch and attacked them. He was covered in blood and made a weird chattering sound like a squirrel. Two cops were clawed. One was bitten so hard that he lost part of his ear. Ford was shot four times in the torso and left thigh as he ran away.
He kept running.
One night when Corbin was taking Bleu Cheese out to pee, Micah had turned down the street with a dog she’d stolen. Although he liked Micah, she was a strange person. Most of the time she was nice enough, but then she exploded at random. He wasn’t sure which side of her was the truth, or if both were. She picked on Zaley something fierce freshman year for coming to school in pigtails, and Corbin was still aghast about the windshield. That was so . . . unhinged. Even more unhinged was how she walked around telling Dale that she was praying for him, sweet as sugar like they were best friends when she hated him. So which was it?
They hung out for a while with the dogs and she told him about a man she once saw on PCP. Corbin didn’t know where Micah saw the shit that she did. She lived in the nicest neighborhood in Cloudy Valley with professional parents, one a lawyer and the other an owner of a string of gyms. Her sister Shalom was in an Ivy League school. The car that Micah drove was a V-6, a used one, but a V-6. On her vacations she went to Hawaii, not a slum. But Corbin believed that somewhere Micah saw a man on PCP running naked down a road, and five cops had not brought him down. PCP didn’t give a person superhuman strength, but it cut off the pain signals to the brain.
Sombra C, in its last stages, had an effect like PCP. Ford just kept going down that road with a bunch of holes punched through him. It wasn’t a normal run, rather stiff-legged, and he yelled. Not a human yell but more of an animal cry to go along with that squirrel chatter. The cops gave chase as Ford bit, scratched, and clobbered twenty pedestrians. One died on the scene, since he bit that poor woman right through her windpipe like some savage creature. At last in a yoga studio, the cops took him down with a bullet through the brain.
“Ford never hurt a fly in his life,” his father said tearfully in an interview. “He was a kind and loving young man, and he didn’t have any mental problems. This is insane. This is just insane.”
It didn’t make the news outside of Colorado. Everyone was swept up in economy problems and overseas saber rattling, the kidnapping of a three-year-old girl from her bedroom in South Carolina, reviews of highly-anticipated summer blockbusters, a most entertaining flood of celebrity scandals and a shocking murder and dismemberment case finally making it to court. Appearing only in local news and attributed to a psychotic break, no one paid much attention. The news was full of far sexier stories.
But four cops had fevers by that evening. Thirteen pedestrians. Five students in the yoga studio, who had been sprayed liberally with his blood when he crashed through the plate glass window with a bullet flying through his brain. The coroner and janitor got it from Ford, the landlord of the apartment got it from the crime scene, and the cop with the bloody ear went to the hospital and left blood in the waiting room . . .
It was out of control. The wives of the cops got it through kissing and sex, as well as the mistress of one of them. The mistress flew to New York to visit family. The patients and the employees of the hospital got it through spilled fluids. One of the employees was fired for searching patient files the day of his infection, and he drove to Minnesota for his father’s funeral and stayed there. A cop’s wife passed it to their six-month-old son through expressed breast milk. Meanwhile, the prostitute was continuing to work, and Corbin winced to see the name Betty Bareback underlined on the page as he listened. (The roommate hadn’t known about Sombra C, but hadn’t he ever heard of AIDS? Herpes? Syphilis? What the hell?) Corbin didn’t click on the name. He remembered from the news how she murdered a waiting client with her bare hands, and then ran senselessly out of her fifth-floor window to impale herself on the fence far below. Blood sprayed over a group of businessmen walking by to a restaurant. As a haz-mat team cleaned up the body, it was falling apart in their hands from decay.
The biting child in the dentist’s office bit his mother and broke the skin. She had sex with her husband. He got a nosebleed at a park and daubed it with a towel, which he threw to the trashcan afterwards and missed. A baby picked up the bloody material and put it in her mouth minutes later. Her mother yanked it away, and she had a fresh paper cut on her finger. She donated her excess of fresh breast milk to two other families. And the infection kept growing.
Ford’s body underwent every medical test in creation, and Sombra C was discovered. A national emergency was declared on the third of July when the second wave of zombies crested. It was a crude name for them, yet it fit. The first confinement point was set up hastily in Denver, and mandatory blood testing instated. Many people refused to open their doors to the emergency medical squads, and those doors were battered down. The numbers swelled to such proportions that a second confinement point was set up in Colorado, and then a third. The fourth in Minnesota, the fifth in New York, and then it exploded in every state in the nation.
A woman went wild in France. Europe shut down all air travel to and from the United States, but it was too late. It was too late everywhere but places like Australia and Japan, which locked down all ports and airports. No one was allowed in without a blood test (later changed to a saliva test) and the one positive person in Australia was put in solitary confinement within a ship on the sea until he died. The ship was burned. Some people shouted religious exemption to testing, but Australia wasn’t budging. Neither was Japan.
“It’s working,” said Corbin when the audio clip finished.
Mom was shaking her head at the news, which had restarted with the hour and was again showing those protestors outside the confinement point. “This virus could end the world. If it were airborne, it already would have. Those points are a necessary evil.” She changed to a weather station, the reporter warning about fires. It had been a very dry year, and there was no rain on the horizon.
Farting again, Bleu Cheese turned around to stare suspiciously. Corbin looked at a diagram. “It’s sort of like AIDS, the way it passes. Except AIDS isn’t transmitted by saliva and tears. Sombra C can be passed by saliva. Not tears toward th
e end, only because someone in the last stages no longer has functioning tear ducts. What does retrovirus mean?”
“Lady Computer knows,” Mom said. She flipped off the television and put her lap table aside. “I am old and have done my learning. Bleu Cheese! What kind of lady are you? Come, let’s take you out for a fart parade with a poop float finale.”
Corbin clicked to a video about basic virology, and as it loaded, he read the words docking glycoprotein slowly. The dog scrambled up at the jingle of the leash and ran to the front door while Mom tucked a plastic bag in her pocket.
“Be good!” Mom called.
He turned in the chair. Mom’s hair had grown out and she’d put weight back on. She looked like Mom, off to do an errand, but she had looked like Mom before the diagnosis. He should have known that Mom wouldn’t plop him at the table for six miserable hours of workbooks. She just wanted him to do some thinking, more thinking than video games and stocking the shelves at Mr. Foods required.
Thinking of Ford Looper running crazily down the road with his bullet-riddled body, Corbin said, “Mom? Be careful.”
Elania
Pewter College, called Pewt by those who went there, was Elania’s dream school. She had her safety schools in the state system, three gigantic places picked out and online application requirements bookmarked on her laptop. But it was the Pewter bumper sticker she ordered online and stuck to her binder for motivation, PEWTER PRIDE with a lion lashing his tail under the words. She loved the archways and old gray stone buildings in the website’s pictures, ivy stretching up the sides, the cool colors of the library. There was a very small fraternity and sorority system, unaffiliated with the larger Greek one and created by the students themselves decades ago.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 4