by Glenn Cooper
“Ooo, gimme one too,” Boris said.
The alarm was starting to attract a bit of a crowd of neighborhood denizens, and a few young men climbed through the broken window, none of them with their mouths and noses covered.
“Glad we got these rad gas masks, dude?” Boris said to Shaun. “Couple more acquisitions then let’s haul ass.”
They added a couple of Croatian stab-resistant vests in camo green—medium for Shaun, XXXL for Boris—a pair of binoculars, and one very expensive night-vision scope from another smashed cabinet.
On the way out Boris said, “Yo, Shaun, you pay the lady.”
“What lady, man?”
On the sidewalk, Boris raised his machete and shouted some war whoops through his bug-eyed head gear. He seemed delighted when the knots of people on the sidewalk backed away.
“Shit, man,” he said to Shaun. “We are fierce. We are invincible. We are kings.”
*
When the power went out in Indianapolis, Mandy was at her house making preparations in the event she needed to move to her lab. There had been brief outages before but as the minutes passed, she had a premonition that this one was going to be different. By the light of a battery-operated lamp, she bagged and boxed food, first-aid supplies, the contents of her medicine chest, essential clothing, and anything else that struck her as useful. It was dark for over an hour when she decided it was time to make a move, but before she did, she took her lamp and knocked on Rosenberg’s door.
Rosenberg answered the door with, “And then there was light.”
She came inside. There were candles on the dining room table, and a half-eaten plate of food.
“I don’t want to interrupt,” she said.
“Nonsense. I can make you something. The gas is on. I can light the stove with a match.”
“I’ve eaten, thanks. I wanted to tell you that I was leaving.”
“Oh? Where are you going?”
“Downtown to my lab. It’s got a generator.”
“I don’t think the power will be off for long, do you?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“Well, far be it from me to doubt the intuition of a smart lady. But I certainly hope you’re wrong. I can’t imagine how we’ll get on without all of our modern conveniences. Will you come back if the lights come on again?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“I hope you do. I know we’ve only gotten to know each other recently, but I enjoy your company.”
“I feel the same way. You might want to come with me, Stanley. I hate the idea of you being alone and in the dark.”
“I won’t be alone. I’ll be with Camila. I’m more concerned about you being alone.”
She assured him that it wouldn’t be for long and let him know that a colleague was planning to drive from Boston to work with her on a cure.
“That’s important work. More important than anything, I’d say. I’d just get in the way. No, I’ll stay here.”
She tested her mobile phone, but the cellular service was down. In case the phones started working again, she jotted down her mobile number for him. She added the lab address.
“I know where this is,” he said. “Camila’s doctor was in the building next door.”
“Well, I’d better be going,” she said.
He asked if she wasn’t forgetting something, and when she couldn’t think what, he put his arms out.
*
Mandy arrived at a dark parking lot that intimidated her with its emptiness. Across the way, the hospital generators seemed to be functioning, because signage was lit. She had to make a few uneasy trips to get all her things inside, but she was relieved that the generator in her building was also working. One of her first actions was to go down to the generator room and follow the instructions on how to switch its mode, restricting power to the circuit that serviced freezers and refrigerators. Then she set about arranging her lab to double as her living quarters. She was no stranger to sleeping on her office sofa when she had to read a gel in the middle of the night, but this was different. One section of lab bench became her food area, another was for emergency supplies, yet another for books—novels she had been meaning to read for ages. She turned the sofa into a nice bed with sheets, a comforter, and her favorite pillow and made a closet by draping clothes over chairs. Her toiletries went into the ladies’ room across the hall.
When she awoke the next morning, she knew the power was still out. Without the boiler, the lab was awfully cool—her battery-operated recording thermometer registered the low sixties. From her fourth-floor windows she saw a few people walking through the campus—she had no idea what they were doing or where they were going, but their pace seemed purposeful. Then she saw something that frightened her. Two people walked up to a medical office building across the courtyard and tried to kick their way through a door. They were unsuccessful and eventually filtered away, but a quickening paranoia set in.
Jamie came to mind, not Derek, and that made her feel rotten. She glanced at the screen of her cell phone on the off-chance that the towers were still working, but the dreaded no-service message put hope to rest. She was cut off. All she could do was stay put and pray he made it to her door.
She did some mental arithmetic. Assuming the east coast lost power about the same time as the Midwest, Jamie would be hitting the road as early as this morning. Maybe add one day to give him time to get ready for the trip. A thousand miles at sixty miles per hour was about sixteen hours of driving. Maybe double that to account for unanticipated road conditions or problems along the way. That meant that the latest he’d be arriving was in two and a half days.
There was plenty to do to get herself in a position to work with Jamie’s CREB molecules. She knew from one of their last conversations that he didn’t know the sequence of either candidate. They would have to sequence the peptides, then use a DNA synthesizer to construct a gene capable of producing them using machines plugged into the freezer circuit. That gene could then be inserted into her adenovirus, yielding a gene therapy that could be tested in patients. There was a logical first subject if Jamie agreed: Emma. The bottom line was that she had up to two and a half days to get her virus out of deep-freeze and biologically manipulate it with enzymes and plasmids to be ready to insert a foreign gene at the precise location it needed to be.
She worked throughout the day and into the night, fueled by a couple of cheese sandwiches. She was a night owl by habit, but the stress of the past days was crushing her stamina. She crawled onto her sofa and switched off her portable lamp at eight-thirty.
As she waited for sleep to take her, she wondered if she might already be dreaming. Light seemed to be dancing around her office, striking the walls and ceiling in crazy flashes and streaks. When she realized her eyes were open, she sat up and saw light beams coming through her windows. She crept toward them. On the path leading from the parking lot, someone was pointing a flashlight up at the building, the fourth floor specifically. The figure was obscured by darkness, but then the person waving the flashlight trained it on himself.
It was Stanley Rosenberg.
Mandy scampered down the four flights and threw open the door for him.
“Miss me?” he said.
“Did I ever.”
“I couldn’t call and there’s no doorbell. I improvised.”
“Come in.”
“I’ve got bags in the car.”
“You’re here to stay?” she asked hopefully.
“If you’ll have me. I figured that we’re meant for each other—if you’re willing to overlook the forty-year difference.”
When they had hauled all his belongings up the stairs and he set up his old camp cot along one wall in the main lab, she suggested a cup of tea. The one electrical luxury she allowed herself was the lab microwave, plugged into the freezer outlet. The two neighbors sat on stools at a lab bench, talked, and laughed a little by the light of Rosenberg’s splendidly bright battery-lamp.
; *
Down in the parking lot, four bug eyes were gazing up through green gas masks.
“Think they got power in there?” Boris asked, leaning heavily on his handlebars.
“They got something,” Shaun said.
“See if that door’s locked.”
“Why me?”
“’Cause you’re closer?”
“What, by three feet?”
“You want me to do it?” Boris asked, exasperated.
“No, I’ll do it.” Shaun came back and told his partner it was, indeed, locked.
“Let’s add this location to our watch list,” Boris said. “See whether they got power tomorrow night.”
“Didn’t know we had a watch list,” Shaun said.
“We do now.”
23
“Dad!”
Craig Mellon came tearing down the stairs and saw his father’s lifeless body splayed outside the front door.
Joe Edison saw his father take aim, but he shouted out, “Don’t shoot him, Pa.”
Edison mumbled, “Suit yourself,” and stepped aside to let his son handle the situation.
Craig took a knee at his father’s side and screamed at Edison, “Why’d you shoot him? He didn’t have a gun. What did he ever do to you?”
Joe had his rifle ready. “Are you fucking serious, Craig?” Joe said. “You were in the church the day your old man kicked us out. You know damned well he was telling people not to buy our beef.”
“I bought your goddamned beef, didn’t I? Just last week.”
“And he’s the one that’s gut-shot, not you,” Joe explained.
Craig’s mother, Gretchen, came down the stairs, screaming her head off.
“They murdered him,” Craig told her. “They shot him in cold blood.”
“I’ll kill you, Blair Edison,” she yelled, “I swear I will.”
She lunged at Edison with balled-up fists. Joe told Craig he had better hold her back.
“Don’t, Mom,” Craig said, grabbing her. “They’ve got guns.”
Gretchen collapsed in a puddle of grief and rage.
Craig confronted the Edisons. “Now what?”
Edison said, “We want your food and your supplies. We’re cleaning you out.”
“How are we supposed to survive? We’ve got sick people.”
“Don’t give a damn. Bring your kin down here. Joe, go up with him.”
They came back, herding four confused souls. Before they got to the front of the hall, Gretchen cried out that she wanted her husband covered up, so her children wouldn’t see him.
“They won’t know who the hell he is,” Edison said, but he allowed her to get a throw from the living room to drape over the body.
The youngest child was Cassie. She seemed the most fearful, shielding herself behind the others. Edison reckoned she was about Brittany’s age, maybe seven or eight, but he was more interested in the older daughter, a pretty brunette with wild, dancing eyes.
“What’s her name and how old’s she?” he asked.
“Alyssa’s about eighteen,” Joe said. “She used to come to football games.”
Joe knew Ryan, Alyssa’s twin brother, a strapping kid who was a forward on the high school basketball team. He’d gone turkey hunting with him and some other guys in the spring. The kid had been a lights-out shot.
“Yo, Ryan, remember me?” Joe asked.
Ryan blinked at him in non-comprehension.
“This your wife?” Edison asked Craig, pointing to a blonde.
Craig nodded once.
“Why’s she crying?”
Trish was in her mid-twenties, hair ironed-straight to the middle of her back.
“I don’t know. She’s been like that since she came down with it. She’s scared, I guess.”
“Good-looking gal,” Edison said.
Craig seethed at him, “Don’t you even talk about her.”
Edison smiled, wagged his pistol at him, and told him to start packing up food. As an afterthought he asked him what firearms they had around.
“Hunting rifles.”
Edison called out to Joe’s friend, Mickey, who was nervously hovering by the door, and said, “Make yourself useful, son. Collect all the weapons and ammo, then keep an eye on Mrs. Mayor and the sick ’uns.”
Edison had Craig and Joe crate up all the food and load up the pickup. Joe checked on Brittany who was still playing with her paddle and ball in the back seat. When the job was nearly done, and Edison was inspecting the recesses of the pantry, Craig struck with a paring knife he had palmed from the kitchen.
Edison heard the rush of steps coming from behind and turned, but the young man was too close for him to raise his pistol high enough. The round he got off hit the floor. The knife thrust would have caught him squarely in the chest had he not raised his left arm to block the blow.
There was another blast, louder than the Colt’s.
At the sound of the gunshot, Joe turned and fired a heavy Remington slug through Craig’s back. The bullet went clear through his heart and sternum, narrowly missed Edison’s shoulder, where it lodged in knotty-pine millwork.
Mickey couldn’t stop Gretchen Mellon from tearing away and reaching the pantry, where she slid her arms under her son.
“You killed my husband! You killed my boy!”
“He tried to stab me,” Edison said. “It was self-defense. I had no intention of killing him.”
Edison picked up the paring knife and pulled Joe aside. “We’ve got a decision to make.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?”
“Way I figure it, we either leave ’em, kill ’em, or take ’em.”
“Take them, we got more mouths to feed,” Joe said.
“There’s that.”
Joe worked through the decision tree. “There’s no sense killing the sick ones. They can’t bear witness against us. Just Mrs. Mellon can.”
“You’re right about that.”
“We’ve got our own sick kin. What’s the upside of taking these on too?”
“Well, for one thing,” Edison said, “that little girl, Cassie, would make a good playmate for Brittany. She seems harmless. Maybe Brittany could teach her to play some games.”
“Okay, I see that.”
“And Mrs. Mayor. She’s still got all her marbles. With ma sick, we’re going to need cooking and cleaning help around the house.”
“We killed her husband and her son. She’ll be hell-bent on revenge.”
“We’ll let her know with no uncertainty that if she tries anything, we’ll hang and butcher her children like they were any side of meat.”
“What about the others?”
“We’ll see if we can turn that big fellow, Ryan, into a beast of burden or something useful.”
“And the girls, Alyssa and Trish? What good are they?”
Edison grinned. “I never thought I’d say this to you, but boy, you’re thinking with your head instead of your dick.”
Joe’s face changed in an instant, from pensive to juvenile. “Shit. Didn’t think of that.”
Edison smiled too. “Life hands you lemons, make some fucking lemonade, why don’t you?”
*
They arrived back to the Edison Stock Farm in a convoy. Mickey drove the mayor’s pickup and Joe took Gretchen’s minivan. Edison had Gretchen in his truck with her hands bound until he knew she was going to behave. The first thing he did when they arrived was sit her down on the porch, get her a glass of water, and untie her hands.
“We never exchanged as much as a word in the past, but mind if I call you Gretchen?” he said.
She stared back in utter hatred.
“Gretchen it is, then. You see, Gretchen, if you hadn’t noticed, even before you lost your husband and your Craig today, the world has changed. Now I don’t know if this sickness is going to pass and if everyone’s minds are going to clear, but even if that happens, we’re entering a new era. There was the before-the-sickness era and now we’ve got the after-the-
sickness era. At least that’s the way I see it. Before the sickness came, I expect you did what my Delia did—she’s upstairs with it—you took care of your family. And now that the sickness is upon us, you’re still going to be taking care of your family, but you’re also going to be taking care of mine, especially my Delia. You’ll all live here in the house. It’ll be tight for space, but we’ll make do. You’ll cook for all of us, you’ll clean, you’ll do the laundry. It’s as simple as that. Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”
She refused to answer.
“I know you’re upset and rightly so. I know you want to bash my brains out and rightly so. But here’s the deal, Gretchen. I’m going to be ruling this household with an iron hand. It will be a Biblical hand. My justice will be swift, and it will be fierce. If you make even the slightest effort to harm me or my family, if you so much as spit in my soup, I will seek retribution not on you, but on yours. The one thing I do better than most men is butchering. One provocation, one threat, and you will watch me turn your children into cuts of meat. Now, let’s go up and meet the Edison clan. Don’t ever forget they are Edisons. Even if they do not have the slightest idea who they are.”
That night the power went out over supper.
Edison had ground some fresh beef. Gretchen was upstairs attending to the needs of infected Edisons and Mellons, so he did the cooking, making the only dish he could reliably pull off—chili over elbow macaroni.
The upstairs living arrangements were dictated by Edison who couldn’t shake the image of his oldest son astride his wife. All the men and boys were put in one mattress-strewn bedroom, and all the women and girls were in another. All except for Cassie Mellon whom he gave to Brittany, the way one might give a puppy or a kitten.
“This is Cassie,” he told his daughter. “She’s your age. Maybe you can teach her to play some games.”
Brittany said, “Can I keep her?”
“Yeah, she’s yours to keep. Treat her real gentle and she’ll be your friend. Okay?”
Brittany rushed off and returned with her hairbrush and began combing Cassie’s long tresses. Cassie seemed to like it. She smiled and out of her mouth came, “M-m-m.”