“Whatever. I’m getting used to this. No more school, no more books, no more teacher’s judgmental eyes,” she sang to herself. “I’m wired and electrified. And I want more coffee.”
When the knock at the door came, Theo drew the meat cleaver from the knife block. Jack answered the door wearing a surgical mask.
Douglas Oliver swayed on his feet, looking gray. “The university hospital is a death house. Despite all the plans put in place for the flu pandemic, there aren’t enough people to put those plans into action. Whatever you’ve been picturing, it’s worse.”
“How do you know?” Jack asked.
“I got sick and I went there. I’ve seen it from the inside…but don’t worry. No fever and I’m past it. I’m not contagious anymore.”
“How do you know for sure?” Anna asked, clinging to the door frame at the entrance to the kitchen.
“Because I ate the Sutr Virus for breakfast, young lady. It tried to eat me up and I ate it. I was horribly sick for days. I went to the hospital last week, though I’m not sure which day it was. I was too feverish. Lost track of the time. Just got back. My dog is gone.”
“As in, dead?” Anna’s eyebrows knit together.
“No, no! I assume not, anyway. He’s doggone gone is all. I can see where he tried to get into the house — ripped the screen to my glass doors, poor, silly bugger. He must have had designs on his dog dish. Or maybe he planned to raid the fridge.”
He gave Jaimie a wink. “Steve dug his way out under the fence. Must be off, nipping down to the market for a flan and a doggy bone. His favorite treats were those pigs ears. I wish I’d treated Steve with those more often. Maybe he’ll come back for more.”
“I’m sorry,” Theo said. “We didn’t even know you were sick. We’d have taken care of the dog had we known.”
Jack gestured for Oliver to sit and he flopped down, beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “I kicked virus ass, but the fight went all twelve rounds. Damn near got me. I’m still weak as a kitten. I wouldn’t have made the walk home except a kind young couple gave me a ride most of the way.”
Jack left the room and returned a moment later with the cup of coffee she’d made for herself. Oliver nodded without saying thank you and asked for toast. “Just a bit of dry white or a rye if you’ve got it and I’ll tell you what’s really going on.”
Theo and Jack looked at each other. Oliver surrendered an embarrassed smile. “Quid pro quo for the news of the world,” he said. “I’m finding myself a bit too tired to make my own toast.” Sensing the pause stretch out, he added, “And my bread got pretty moldy while I was incapacitated. Maybe you folks should eat it for the antibiotic boost, hm?”
Quid pro quo. It was a relief for Jaimie to hear someone speak such elegant words out loud. Jaimie wondered if he could have a conversation with Mr. Oliver. Maybe the old man could understand him better than others.
Mr. Oliver ate first, with one hand cupped under his plate to catch crumbs. He did not speak until he finished eating.
“Last week, I took my temperature. It was 102 degrees and I had no appetite after throwing up through the night. You know those dry heaves where there’s nothing left to give and it comes up from, uh…your groin?”
Mrs. Bendham drove him to Emergency. There was no parking within blocks of the hospital. “We left the car in a convenience store parking lot. My beautiful Mercedes is gone. There was some broken glass where I left it. Mrs. Bendham helped me make it to the entrance at Emerge. I would never have made it without her.”
Mr. Oliver’s eyes took on a wet sheen. Jaimie watched him go grayer. His vibrancy faded. “I knocked on Mrs. Bendham’s door before I knocked on yours. She told me about Al. Poor old, blind coot. If I’d gotten home last night, maybe I could have caught him in time to say goodbye.”
He was quiet for a moment so Jaimie looked up the word coot. Good word, coot.
“Last week, I sure didn’t think I’d be alive and he’d be the one laid out.” Oliver wiped his eyes with the back of his big hands and pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Blind men make lousy golfers, but I tried to coach him at the driving range. Al always tried to muscle the drive. Never got into a smooth pendulum swing…a good friend, though. He said he’d take care of feeding Steve and I guess he did until he couldn’t anymore.”
“Tell us about the hospital,” Jack said.
“Well, unusual doings. There weren’t many doctors or nurses. I was one of the few patients who should have been there since I don’t have family to take care of me. The original plan was isolation, but that takes personnel. Things stayed organized for a while, but without staff, they just opened the doors and told everybody to find a bed if they could. Most of the younger doctors and nurses stopped coming into work.”
“How could they abandon people like that?” Anna asked.
“Oh, don’t be too hard on them. I think they were the smart ones, exercising the better part of valor. When the ship is sinking, you don’t prove anything by going down with it. Suicide can be courageous, but the Sutr Virus doesn’t need all those young people sacrificing themselves on the altar of misplaced duty.”
“But all those sick people — ” Anna said.
“All those sick people,” Oliver raised his voice for the first time, “were going to be dead or not. We’re so used to there being convenient solutions for everything and everyone dying in apple pie order, oldest first. Nature has other opinions.”
He snuffled, blew his nose and gave Anna a soft look of apology. When he spoke again, it was in a low voice. “What I saw was families taking care of their own. I’ve seen the same in the Third World. People on cots in hallways, on roofs, anywhere there’s a space for a body to lie down and die. Mothers and sisters and brothers and fathers camp out next to them and pray and wait because there is little or no medicine. That’s what we’ve got for this. No medicine but water and caring looks. All we’ve got to rely on now is our individual immune systems.”
“How long were you there?” Theo asked.
“Seven days, I think. This is Tuesday, right?”
“Wednesday.”
Oliver went ashen. Jaimie thought, I love the word ashen.
“Wednesday. I guess the delirium lasted longer than I thought. It seemed like each time I came around there were different people in the beds beside me. We didn’t talk much, except for Charlotte.”
The old man looked from face to face and his tears came faster. Jaimie watched each tear track, slipping over the burst capillaries of Oliver’s cheeks. Anna and Theo watched the living room carpet as Jack disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with the last of the coffee.
After a long silence, Oliver told the family about Charlotte. He had seen her when he first entered the Emergency department. Long lines of the sick snaked everywhere. Someone handed out masks at the door so everyone looked the same. “Charlotte stood out because she had the most amazing long, red hair. I saw her come and go. Lovely green eyes. She was tall. You couldn’t miss her.”
There wasn’t a bed or a cot for Oliver at the hospital for the first day. “I’d have done better staying home on the couch. At least then I’d have the TV for company.”
“Tell us more about the hospital,” Theo said.
“Crowded. Charlotte told me that before things had gotten out of hand, there were more doctors and nurses and they could at least make people more comfortable. By the time I got there, they were running low on drugs. It’s not just the epidemic. Everything else that hospitals do is shut down, too. Think of all those cancer clinics, the people who need dialysis. Right now their kidneys are killing them, blowing up and bursting or whatever they do when people don’t get treatment that, last month, was a simple thing.” He ran a hand through his thin white hair.
“Charlotte wasn’t a nurse, you know. She was a massage therapist. She’d worked in a spa before everything went to hell.”
“She was sent there. She told me The Powers That Be sent a truck around. When so many doctors and nurses refused to report for work, the government used all the addresses to anyone who could even remotely be considered a health care worker. Poor Charlotte. She didn’t want to go, but they made her. She had a baby boy she left with her husband. She was a gopher, fetching this and that, moving bodies, helping people to the toilet and rinsing bedpans. She told me there were a couple optometrists who were telling her what to do but they weren’t doing anything themselves.”
“They sent a truck?” Theo said, incredulous.
“Government always does what it wants. In times like these, more of their dirty business meets the light, that’s all. They kick in doors overseas and we don’t blink. We shouldn’t be so surprised they’ll do it here, too, if it suits them.”
“What happened to Charlotte?” Anna asked.
“Oh, I saw her at the beginning and the end. She got me a bed. I remember that. I was blubbering like a baby, asking her not to forget about me. I was on a cold tile floor when she found me. That felt kind of good at first but as time went on, I’d have sold my soul for a mattress to die on. She came back for me though. She remembered me and now all I can do is remember her.”
Charlotte came back with a wheelchair and helped him to a bed. “The sheets were still warm and sweat-soaked, but I didn’t care at that point,” he said. “I thought I was lying down for the last time.”
A harried nurse inserted an intravenous needle into his arm to remedy his dehydration. Oliver saw one doctor, once, in all the time he was in the hospital. He didn’t see Charlotte for days and when he did see her again, she was a patient.
“It was bad, especially at night,” he said. “The days were boring and I was in and out of consciousness. Nightmares teach that boring isn’t so awful. I remember watching a digital clock and the numbers were fighting each other. It was this grand battle. I watched and it made perfect sense at the time. Fever cooked my brain a bit.”
“But you got better and they discharged you?” Anna asked.
“No one discharged me. I woke up last night and I decided I wasn’t dying anymore. My sweat was cold and I felt hungry. I figured that had to be a good sign. When I sat up, I was the only person in the room still breathing. There were ten of us. Four were covered up. The rest just lay there, died in the night, I guess. The air smelled of shit and vomit and I figured I was alive, but if I wanted to stay that way, I’d better get the hell out of there. What we used to say in jest was never more true: the hospital is a terrible place for a sick person.”
“Everyone was dead?” Anna shuddered.
“No, no. There were people moving around here and there. Looked like a horror movie. It was so quiet. I think it would almost be a comfort if someone had the energy for a good, full-throated scream and wail. Instead, the quiet was eerie. I think everybody went numb. Families carried their dead out if they had the gumption. If you could head to the exit, you did. A hospital without doctors and nurses and medicine is just a lot of brick and mortar with germs and viruses breeding.”
Jaimie straightened. The word for hospital-bred infection is nosocomial. It made him think of viruses shooting up noses.
Oliver laughed a ragged cackle. “In the hallway outside my room there was a fellow on a gurney. He was propped up, reading a book of poetry and looking like an oblivious twit. The cover of his book read Evil Poems for Everyday People. Can you beat that? I looked around and I thought, who needs any more evil in their heads than what’s all around us in the real world?”
“I offered to help him get out of there. The man said his back was bothering him and he was going to wait for someone to X-ray it. He refused to leave. I said maybe an optometrist would look at his back if he was lucky and I kept going. Moron.”
“About Charlotte,” Anna said. “Tell us.”
He spotted Charlotte by her long red hair in the waiting room. There were people sitting around her, coughing into their masks or trying to sleep in chairs. “I chose to think a bunch were sleeping, but I knew mostly, they were dead or dying. No other reason to be there. I had to pick my way across the floor, stepping between bodies.
“When I spotted Charlotte, she had a carpenter’s sawdust mask over her mouth and nose. She held her little blue baby in a blue blanket. She stared down into her baby’s face. I spoke to her like she was still there. I told her how she had to take the baby and get out because she was better off at home.” Oliver looked at the ceiling, as if studying the stucco for a pattern that gave him reasons and answers.
“The baby had a strip of cloth covering its mouth and nose. The boy stared back at his mother. They had the same beautiful green eyes.”
Anna’s face drained white.
“The germs are winning,” Oliver said.
He began to cry and spoke through choked sobs. “I pulled their masks back. I-I’d n-never seen skin…so blue. I couldn’t believe it. I c-couldn’t understand it. Whoever the Powers That Be are, they murdered that poor girl and her baby.”
Jaimie wanted to tell the old man the word he needed to understand was cyanotic. Of course, he didn’t.
Pay the Piper's Cost
A far away bell banged to a steady beat as Douglas Oliver ate a second piece of toast on the Spencers’ couch. Jaimie wasn’t allowed to eat in the living room, though his sister broke the rule often. The word impunity sprung up in his mind, looking red and sharp around the edges of the p and t.
The bell rang louder as someone approached, a clear, happy jangle. The Spencers and Oliver walked outside, stood on the front step for a moment and moved to the lawn to get a better look. At last, a brightly painted red and yellow van turned the corner at the top of their street. The vehicle moved at a walking pace.
On the side of the truck body were the words: Burko’s Knife Sharpening and Small Repairs. The bell was suspended from a side mirror and the driver pulled a rope and clapper to send out the merry peal.
Four men in coveralls, gas masks and gloves that reached to their elbows walked behind the truck, which stopped every 100 feet. The men split into pairs, each team headed for a house on opposite sides of the street. Behind the van, another truck idled. It looked like it was used for transporting livestock.
No one said anything. Everyone but Jaimie knew instinctively what purpose the procession served. Jack reached out and gently removed Jaimie’s baseball cap from his head and gave it to him to hold.
In the back of the farm truck lay long, black bags. Piled atop them were long white plastic bags. On top of that, they could see two bodies, blank eyes watching an indifferent, blue sky.
Jaimie had never seen a dead body. He noticed something he had never seen in another person. The dead have no aura. Without breath, people are just things. Whatever they had been, they weren’t that now. This was a spiritual realization in which to take comfort. The sight of the dead bothered him no more than would a truckload of coffee tables. The things that had once been people were just more inanimate objects throwing no interesting colors. Whatever spirit there might have been had gone elsewhere, fled to wherever it is energy goes.
Odd, he thought that there is no word for “one without an aura”, but there is a word for “one without a shadow”: Ascian. Perhaps that would do.
The driver rang his bell again and this time called out, “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
“He enjoying himself, you think?” Jack asked.
Theo shrugged.
“Gone a little crazy, maybe,” Oliver said. “Perhaps it’s early days for that, though. This isn’t the end. This is the beginning.”
As his family stood transfixed, Jaimie noticed a small anthill at his feet at the edge of the driveway. He bent to watch the ants scurry back and forth. Their movement looked random at first, but each ant had a purpose. He bent closer, squinting. He could just make out a tiny yellowish and
dirty red aura around each ant.
He took a deep breath through his nose but, to his disappointment, the boy could detect no smell. He’d read that not only was there an odor trail each ant could lay down for others to follow, but each species, colony and nest had distinctive smells. Jaimie could detect nothing.
How much else, he wondered, was laid out before him but beyond his reach? Did ignorance bother people, or were they content to know less and live in tiny, narrow worlds? Everyone he knew could use their voices at will, but they didn’t ask nearly as many questions as he would like to do.
The men knocked on doors, rung doorbells and called out to whoever might be in hiding. A young woman appeared at her front door clutching a wine bottle. She was a teacher who had moved in a few doors down on the opposite side of the street the previous fall. She wore a pink bathrobe and fuzzy bunny slippers. Before the men were halfway up the walk, she shook her head, waved them off and slammed her door.
The ringing continued, as if the van’s driver were working at a faster pace than the plodding carriers of the dead.
“I’m getting déjà vu,” Oliver said. “Bolivia, 1982. Toronto in 1988. In Bolivia, I was doing a diamond deal when a fever went through a little village. That took the babies and the old people. I didn’t feel scared then. I was young and healthy and I didn’t think anything could touch me. It was just sad and, to be honest, kind of an adventure. I told stories about dead bodies being carried out around me for years. Cocktail chatter.”
He looked at his shoes. “Then in the late ’80s, I lost many friends. So many beautiful young men with so much promise died all around me, wasting away, their immune systems blasted. Still, it didn’t get me. And here I am in the middle of another epidemic. It almost killed me this time, but still, here I am. It’s unfathomable.”
Jack and Theo both reached out to put a hand on the old man’s shoulders as they watched the men carry Al Bendham’s body to the rear truck in a sheet. There was a moment of awkward jockeying as the men tossed the body on top of the pile and flopped it over. The sheet came away so they could see their neighbor’s body. The men covered him with the same sheet they’d used to carry him.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 10