A slender, bald man wearing a hospital mask stepped down from the van’s driver’s seat. Carrying a clipboard, he jogged to the Bendham house and walked in without knocking. A moment after he disappeared inside, a shriek went up and they watched as he back-peddled out. Mrs. Bendham, arms straight, pushed him with both hands. He, too, kept both arms straight. He held the clipboard between them like a shield.
“SD!” the man yelled. “SD! SD!”
The four men by the truck didn’t move. They watched, a low chuckle betraying their amusement.
Oliver ran toward the Bendham house. His burst of speed surprised the onlookers, considering his age.
“Take it easy, Douglas!” Theo called. “You’re still recovering!”
Heedless, Oliver pulled Mrs. Bendham back and held her by the shoulders.
“I just need a name, date of birth and when he died,” the man with the clipboard said. “Official statistics!”
“Where are you taking him?” Mrs. Bendham yelled. “Where are you taking my husband?”
“We’re taking all the bodies outside of town. North. There’s a farm up there where we’re…where they’re all going. For public safety.”
Mrs. Bendham looked up into Oliver’s lined face, hesitated and, through gritted teeth, gave the man the information he wanted.
“Beware men with clipboards,” Mr. Oliver said.
The man made a note and returned to the truck as two men stepped toward Oliver’s house. “Never mind that one, you buggers. That’s my house! You won’t get me! I’m immortal!”
The other pair came up the Spencer’s driveway. “Anything for us?” one asked quietly.
Jaimie stayed crouched over the ants but, as the newcomers approached, he looked up warily at the big strangers.
Anna, Theo and Jack shook their heads so the men turned to go.
“What’s SD?” Jack asked.
“Social distancing,” the bigger man of the two said. “Don’t mind the boss, there,” tossing a nod toward the man in the red truck. “He rings that bell real good but that’s about it. Please excuse him. He’s an idiot.”
“But he’s awesome at ringing that damn bell,” the other man said.
The men followed the trucks as they slowly trundled down the street. At the intersection, four houses down, the Spencers watched as the men struggled another, apparently overweight, body into the back of the truck.
Mrs. Bendham had already retreated into her house alone and Mr. Oliver returned to retrieve his jacket. “Good thing she didn’t see that abomination.”
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Imagine watching your husband’s corpse get squashed under that fat load.”
“Anna!” Jack and Theo said in unison.
“Hey, your daughter’s right. And that’s not the only thing that would drive her nuts. They aren’t burying those bodies. They’re off for burning.”
“You sure?” Theo asked.
“I saw some other trucks like these last night as I was making my way back. For a little bit, I got a ride from one…in the front,” he added. “The driver told me. Said there are big burning piles north of here. He had a full load in the back of the truck and he had a bottle of some god awful cologne spilled down the front of his shirt to drown out the smell.”
When Theo said nothing, Oliver leaned in closer and added in a low voice, “I saw what the driver had seen when I looked in his eyes. Situations like this? The thin veneer of civilization that gives society its friendly, glossy sheen gets scratched off. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but the truck I got a ride in last night that had a lot of bodies in back? It was a garbage truck.”
Jack shuddered. “God help us.”
The trucks pulled around the corner and out of sight. “I’ll stay with Mrs. Bendham a bit,” Mr. Oliver said, nodding toward her house.
“Anything we can do?” Jack said.
“I can’t think what. We’ll get out some old photo albums and she’ll tell me all about how they met. I’ll tell her about all the good times I had beating Al senseless at golf.” He gave a pained smile. Tears came to his eyes again. “Al was the best friend I ever had. Besides Steve.”
Jaimie watched Anna’s face twist for a moment between a smile and a scowl. “It must be difficult, losing your dog and your golfing buddy all at once.”
“Oh, no. I’m worried about my dog but…” Oliver strained for a smile through his tears. “I named the dog Steve, yes, but he came much later. My Steve died a long time ago. He’s got a square in the AIDS quilt.” The old man spread his big hands out, a bewildered gesture. “And here I am amid all this death again. Besides a touch of arthritis and Irritable Bowel Syndrome, I’m Superman. I guess my parents forgot to tell me I’m from Krypton.”
Jaimie’s head came up sharply from his study of the ant colony, his eyes bright. They hadn’t thought he’d been listening. They jumped when the boy blurted, “Kal-El!”
Remember all you've lost
Early on April 1st, Theo and Jack made jokes about how they wished the plague was a massive April Fool’s prank. Somehow the curse would lift at noon and it would be just another day, like all the days before quarantine fell on them. Instead, it seemed some silent signal had passed through the city. By noon, it was obvious that many of the people in hiding had decided: it was time to run. They were off to seek out safer places, presumably far from the homes where viruses thrived.
They weren’t just worried about Sutr anymore. They worried about the germs that sprang up around dead bodies. The man with the clipboard and his workers did not venture into homes where no one answered the door. In many of those homes, the healthy had taken care of the dying. Soon the dying were dead and it was their caregivers’ turn.
Misericordia Drive fed an urban sprawl, a rabbit’s warren of streets, courts and crescents of single family homes packed tightly together. The cars and trucks formed a slow line, “like a funeral procession,” Theo said, as he stood at the window watching the exodus.
Jack punched him in the shoulder. “Sh.”
“Seriously, how does a panic start?”
“Dominoes, love. Dominoes. Somebody started packing up their car. Somebody else saw them packing,” Jack said. “Panic’s a virus, too. It spreads.”
“They’d be safer clearing out the dead, watching out for each other and staying put,” Theo said. “If everybody stayed and we dared to…dared to go into the quiet houses…everyone could stay.”
“I don’t think it’s on anyone’s mind to take care of anyone but themselves and their families now. It’s not that kind of world anymore. I wonder if it ever was?”
The family had a front row seat because their house stood near the mouth of one of two exits spilling out on to Fanshawe Park Road. These names were a mystery to Jaimie because, as far as he knew, there was no Fanshawe Park, or least not one anywhere nearby.
Jaimie knew the name for the practice of naming places, cities, streets and rivers: Onomastics. But knowing the name of the work did not help him understand its mechanics. From what he’d observed, many places were named for what they no longer were. The new housing development to the west was called Fox Field. There used to be a field there, and presumably in the woods beyond there had been foxes. Now it was a sea of semi-detached homes.
One afternoon Jaimie became so stymied and obsessed about the ludicrous term “semi-detached”, he bit his fingernails too short. It meant houses that were separate, but one, long board spanned the narrow space between them. Unfathomable.
From onomastic’s dictionary entry, Jaimie glimpsed Onanism, the definition of which put him on to the definition of masturbation. That made no sense to him. The definition seemed oddly coy, meant to skirt understanding rather than to provide instruction. Jaimie turned the recliner to the window so he could watch the procession of cars and still explore his dictionary.
The parade carried on all day, as if the virus defied the Spencer’s wish that the worst must surely b
e over. Each vehicle was fully loaded and low on the axles. Several cars towed pleasure boats.
“If you’ve got a cottage to hide out in, it might not be too bad if you’ve got lots of canned goods, or if maybe you’re good with a deer rifle,” Theo said. “Even better if you’re on an island you can defend.”
“Why’s everybody leaving?” Anna asked.
“Not everybody, honey,” Jack said. She stepped behind her daughter and wrapped her arms around her as they watched the procession.
“Look at that!” Theo said. A station wagon drove past their house slowly with bungee cords holding a huge cabinet to its roof. On top of that, a rocking chair lay on its side, secured with criss crosses of dirty, yellow rope.
“My God, it’s like the Joads are escaping the Dust Bowl again,” Jack said.
“Or maybe it’s the Jews heading out into the desert,” Theo said, “hoping for salvation in isolation.”
“Or they’re rats from a sinking ship,” Anna said.
By late afternoon, they had tired of watching the cars creep by. Theo reached out and turned a dowel to close the blinds to the outside world. “C’mon guys,” Theo said. “Let’s do something else. We haven’t played Monopoly in about five years and I think it’s time for the anniversary game.”
Anna groaned but didn’t resist the distraction her parents offered. “What else am I going to do?”
“Onan?” Jaimie whispered.
Only Theo heard him. He had the grace to laugh.
* * *
The family spent their days inside the house, locked in or keeping the world out, none were sure. The flood had turned to a trickle and they rarely saw a car drive past. A few people walked, traveling in ones or twos, laden with backpacks. More trucks carried the dead away to be burned.
On the morning of April 7, Anna watched the body trucks roll by, the red and yellow van in the lead. She was jubilant. “Look! Look! They hardly have any bodies in the back of that farm truck! Like one or two, maybe. You know what that means? Maybe I’m not going to lose the whole school year after all. The virus is burning out! It’s over!”
She immediately got on the phone to spread the good news to her friends. By noon she was deflated and lounged at the window, staring at nothing. The trucks returned and the pile atop the rear truck stood higher than before.
“They must have changed their route,” Anna said. “And Jenna Simmons and Nattie Kilbourne are dead. I went to kindergarten and took music with them and they’re dead.” Anna wept and retreated to her room for the rest of the day.
The Spencers listened to the radio and waited for good news but there wasn’t anything new except the government’s repeated warnings that looters would be shot and intercity travel was dangerous and discouraged. The radio warned of barricades on all east-west roads. Travelers could spread disease, so if they tried to enter a city, interlopers could be shot.
Who would do the shooting was an open question. They hadn’t seen a police cruiser for more than a week. The radio news mentioned National Guard deployment, but they’d seen no soldiers on patrol in their neighborhood. Eventually, even the radio news departments seemed to tire of relentless bad news and gave up several newscasts in a row, replacing useless words with music.
The news had taken on such a repetitive drumbeat that Anna started referring to it as “the olds”. The music had changed on the radio, too. No rap or metal or thrash. Soothing blues, which Jaimie saw as a deep indigo, were ubiquitous, as was soft classical and somber hymns. It was as if all the businesspeople who managed radio stations got the idea at once that a mass funeral was going on and only classical violin would do.
“They’re only playing music for the dead, not the people still listening,” Anna complained. Quiet and subdued, Anna grew frustrated spinning the radio’s dial. She switched to her iPod and listened for hours to her music.
“I don’t miss the radio and TV ads,” Jack said. “I just realized, there aren’t any advertisements for anything.”
“We never listened to the ads, anyway. We barely listened to the radio at all before the crisis,” Theo said.
The only spoken word programs that had surged back across many radio stations were religious shows. Theo turned it off when they came on. Jack turned it back on, but low, bending close to catch the plethora of whispered warnings, I-told-you-sos and the many promises of a better world to come.
“This is just as has been foretold. This is a judgment, but it’s not too late for redemption!” a preacher thundered. “It’s not too late for glory. Give yourself over to Jesus Christ, let him into your heart, and reject the lives you have lived. All else is death and damnation everlasting!”
“Shut it off, please, Jack. You don’t believe that stuff.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Jack said. “Sure, there are some crazy things being said here and there, but what about the underlying value? I want to fill up on some hope if you don’t mind.”
Theo crossed his arms. “If you’d grown up in Japan, that might be a Shinto priest yelling at you. Wherever you go, there are people trying to sell easy solutions. It would be nice if it were true. That doesn’t make it true. Otherwise there’d be a Santa Claus.”
Jaimie looked up from his Latin dictionary, his face pinched. At sixteen, he still believed in Santa. His parents and sister had spoken so earnestly about Santa Claus, and there’d been presents. How could it not be true? Now he’d spotted his father’s aura as he’d spoken of Santa Claus as if he didn’t exist. His mother spoke earnestly about God, but God left no presents each morning of December 25. He could detect no deceit from her.
The dictionary was no help. Santa Claus was the dutch name for Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children. Santa was based in something real. But God? Jaimie wasn’t sure. His mother referred to the deity as “merciful”. God possessed omnipresence. Santa Claus produced presents. God, zero; Santa, one. As Anna would say, “Advantage: Santa.”
Seeing Jaimie’s troubled look, Jack took her husband’s arm and they didn’t speak again until they were out in the garden. “Let’s not talk about these things in front of the kids.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
She handed him a small packet of sunflower seeds. “Let’s plant these around the perimeter of the yard,” she said. People won’t be able to see in our backyard so well. I love sunflowers. And their seeds.”
Her garden plans had grown since her trip out of the city to find more seeds. She pointed to a bare patch of earth by their small shed. “I’m going to put pumpkins over there.”
Theo was undeterred. “I don’t want the kids hearing that religious crap on the radio, Jack. It has more potential to scare them than to give them any hope or solace.”
“What about me?” Jack said. “People are dying all around us. I’m scared I’m going to lose my kids. When this started, it was slow and theoretical and now…”
“Now it feels like the house is on fire, I know. Now is the worst time to panic.”
“I was listening to that preacher so I wouldn’t panic. I haven’t slept the night through in a week. I dreamt last night that the corpse handlers came back and piled Anna and me onto their truck and drove away laughing. My faith is kinda shaky right now. That’s why I like to hear those preachers. They’re a relief because they’re so full of…”
“Crap?”
“Certainty.”
Theo held his wife close, not knowing what to say. If he spoke, his voice might tremble and that might be enough reason for her to stop listening.
She pushed him away. “How do you do it, Theo? You’re acting like you’re on vacation.”
“We’re the parents, Jack. I’m afraid, but we don’t have the luxury of looking afraid. Anna could lose it big time and I sure don’t want her running off with that idiot boyfriend.”
“Anna talked to him on the phone yesterday. His aunt and uncle died and Anna wanted to go over.”
&nbs
p; “You didn’t tell me,” he said.
“I know how you feel about Trent after the door incident. I didn’t have the luxury of getting you all pissed off about it. Anna does well not showing it, but I think she’s hanging on by her fingernails.”
“At least he’s just a few streets away. Remember our phone bills from when ours was a long-distance relationship?”
“I remember. It was hell.”
“We thought it was at the time, sure. The plague wins first place in that competition.”
Theo looked at the pack of seeds in his hand, scanning for instructions and finding none. “How far apart should we plant these things anyway?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
He grinned. “Okay.” He bent and pushed a thumb into the earth and dropped a seed in. A couple inches over, he made an identical hole and dropped in two seeds, wondering if that would ensure growth or make the seeds compete with each other and die. “I’ll just have faith that it will work out,” he said.
“What if it doesn’t? What if it doesn’t work out?”
“Then it doesn’t,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to watch what we say and,” he looked at her meaningfully, “what we listen to. The radio isn’t very helpful for much at all at the moment. Not for everybody.”
Jack said nothing. Instead, they planted sunflower seeds together, each mulling their own thoughts.
Jaimie watched them work from the dining room window. They had their backs to each other, he noticed, and their energies did not intermingle the way they usually did. He didn’t know what that meant, but he thought it was a good thing for his mother. Jaimie had watched the black specks in his father’s aura grow in vibrancy for the last several days. Their ominous strength would soon make them wasps in his father’s aura. That, he understood.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 11