“What’s my mother’s name then?”
Jack shrugged again. She glanced at the others. Many held hockey sticks, but she took in each face, looking from one to another. Most looked almost as scared as she was. Almost. Some looked happy and excited.
“Are you bluffing me, old lady?”
“Who are you talking to? I’m not old!”
The group grinned and a couple laughed out loud.
“Just a sec. I’m coming down.” The sound of wheels on tile whizzed away and after a couple of minutes, he was coming to them. The little girl stayed by the balcony rail staring down at Jack.
The young man rolled up on a skateboard. At first, Jack thought David was going to knock her over. At the last moment, he jumped off the board and jabbed at the back end with his forefoot. The skateboard popped up into his arms. He held it up like he was about to bash her in the face.
David scowled. “I don’t know you, and more important, you don’t know me or my moms. You tried to play me! You think I’m stupid?”
“Are you sure you don’t know me?” Jack offered. “I know a lot of people…and you lost your glasses, didn’t you?”
A girl in the closing circle tittered. She carried a large mahogany piano leg with nails sticking out of it.
“Don’t mess with me, lady.”
“Watch out,” the boy with the bow called, taking a step closer. “She might turn you over her knee and spank you.” The group laughed again.
Oliver stepped away from Jaimie, closer to Jack and the group’s leader. Seeing his movement, the Mallrats moved closer still, holding their weapons higher.
“Step back!” Oliver yelled. He held his walking stick out like a lance, warning them, sweeping it back and forth. Two larger boys moved left and right to get the old man between them.
Anna dashed forward to her mother’s side and Jaimie followed slowly, looking up at the glass in the high ceiling. By the slant of the light, he thought it would be dinner time soon. He was getting hungry.
The archer ran forward, making sure he wouldn’t miss.
“Stop it!”
Everyone froze at the clear, high voice. It was the little black girl.
“Stop!” she repeated and pointed at Jaimie. “I know him! He goes to my school! He goes to my school!”
“You sure, baby girl? He’s too old to go to your school,” David said. His hands were tight on his skateboard. He still looked as ready as ever to attack. “What’s that kid’s name, Baby Girl?”
In her strange high voice, the girl answered, “Retard,”
Except for Jack, Anna, Jaimie and David, the group laughed. Some nearly collapsed in laughter.
“Baby, you know Daddy doesn’t like that word.”
“I didn’t say it,” she said. “The other kids said it. They’re mean to him.” She pointed at Jaimie. “He’s nice. He never hurt nobody.”
“You mean he never hurt anybody,” David corrected the girl.
“That’s what I said.”
“Lots of people are mean that way,” Jack said. “Your little girl is very cute.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t want her to see you bash me in the face.”
David’s grip on his skateboard relaxed, though the boys circling Oliver weren’t letting their guard down. Sensing his distraction, the young archer moved up behind Oliver and placed the tip of his arrow at the base of his neck. “My arm is getting tired, old man. Put that stick down. And that other thing, too.”
The bear spray canister hit the tile with a clang and, rather than drop his walking stick, Oliver leaned heavily on it and he put his free hand to his chest, breathing hard.
“Oh, great,” he grimaced. “One way or another, you bunch will be murderers when I drop dead.” Oliver began to pant.
Two boys with hockey sticks stepped away from him and even the steely-eyed archer faltered, giving the bowstring slack and letting the arrowhead slip from the old man’s neck to point to the floor.
David gave the archer an encouraging nod of approval and turned to look up at his daughter. “How is Ret — um…how is that boy nice, Baby?”
“He’s never been mean to me. The same kids who are mean to him are mean t’me.”
“They’re mean because they’re jealous,” Anna said. Everyone turned to her. She stepped in front of her mother, close to David. “I never knew her name, but I know who she is. I pick up my brother from his school. He takes special classes from a teacher who works with kids like him,” Anna said. “I pick my brother up every day. All the moms who pick up their kids at the playground call her the singing girl.”
David nodded. “Yeah, my Baby Girl sings all the time. She’s going to be a star some day. When this is all over, I’m going to be able to finance her career and no record company will own us and we’ll go on tour. She’ll remind the world what beauty is. She’ll be our opening act.” His face took on a dreamy look. “It’s gonna be sweet to be a rich man. The toilets are backed up now, but after plague days are done? It’s going to be sweet. Fewer people, fewer hassles.”
Oliver’s face was red and he was beginning to shake. “Excuse me…” he gasped. “Dying here.” He pointed at his chest. His jaw worked up and down but no sound came out.
The archer stepped around him, looked in his face and kicked the walking stick out from under him. Oliver collapsed to the ground, landing on his face. “Ouch!” he cried out.
“Give it up, old man,” the archer said. “Nobody’s buying it.”
Oliver looked up at him and a lopsided grin crawled across his face. “Worth a try,” he said. “Not long ago that act would have gotten me an ambulance.”
A tough-looking girl of about fifteen with purple streaks through her long hair stepped forward. She held two uneven lengths of rebar. “So you know Baby and Baby recognizes your retard brother from school. So what? Trespassers will be prosecuted. We said that, remember? This is Mallrat territory! What’s it worth if we don’t defend it?”
“Shut up, Sonya!’ David said. “Everybody just chill. Brass-balled momma here is right. I’m not going to scar Baby for life by, y’know, scarring anybody for life. What’s wrong with you?”
Sonya retreated to the edge of the group in disgust and dug out a cigarette pack from her pocket.
David turned back to Jack, squinting at her again. “You really tried to bluff me. That’s funny.”
“It worked once when some kids were about to throw water balloons at me. They were a lot younger than you, though,” Jack said.
David laughed and nodded. “Okay, Brassy. I hereby grant you a pass. Get out of here, and tell everyone you meet to stay out of the mall. Tell them it’s Mallrat territory.”
Anna stepped closer to the gang’s leader. “We’ll tell everybody we meet there are at least a hundred of you in here if you want — ”
“That would be good.”
“For a price,” Anna said. “We’re not leaving with just a bunch of plastic bags. If you want fewer intruders, you should put up a sign. Seems to me you need someone to go out there and say how badass you are so the legend spreads. The name Mallrats is nothing but a movie unless somebody spreads your word, David.”
Jack and David looked at her with new respect. “Your daughter, huh?” He looked Anna up and down and gave her a friendly smile. “It’s cool. I got a soft spot for hotness.”
He turned to Jaimie, stepping close to study his face. He stepped back almost immediately. It felt like he’d walked into a forcefield. “Uh…okay…I got an idea. Follow me.”
Zombified, carrier or in the ground?
Dusk closed the day quickly as birds searched out their nests for the night. The Mallrats leader escorted Douglas Oliver and the Spencers out of the mall. Baby Girl’s angelic voice followed them out, echoing after them until they reached the door to the parking lot.
The fires to the south seemed much closer in the encroaching dark. Fires threw o
range light to the sky, mimicking city shine.
Jack, Anna and Jaimie each wore new hiking boots. David had refused to give Oliver anything and the gang confiscated his bear spray.
There’d been so little of value where Jack had searched because anything useful or edible had been moved to the mall’s second floor and was guarded by the Mallrats. They squeezed everything they wanted into Target. The store was their warehouse and their fortress.
For all the danger, the hiking boots seemed a small prize. David had decided their public relations efforts were worth three pairs of hiking boots, or maybe it was just a demonstration of good will for Baby Girl’s sake.
David put a gentle hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Hey, Brass Momma. I have to tell you something. We’ve heard stuff. We hear there are looters, like gangs of them in the ’burbs. They might look military, but they’re looters. Have you seen them out there in the wilds?”
“Gangs? No. We have heard gunshots at night sometimes.”
“Watch out,” the young man said. “A lot of people are dead, but everybody who ought to be dead isn’t yet.”
David gave them an elaborate bow and paused to endow Anna with a smile and a wink. “You’re welcome to come back, by the way. Hotness is always welcome.”
He backed up, and, before he turned away and disappeared into the mall, he nodded to Jaimie.
Jaimie nodded back.
Oliver had been silent since his heart attack ruse had failed. He could contain himself no longer. “That wasn’t smart! That wasn’t brave! That was lucky! You never tell an enemy you are unarmed.”
Jack shouldered her pack. “You’re right.”
“My god! I — ” Oliver began.
“I said, you’re right. What more do you want?”
“I want my bear spray back! It was the only weapon I had that worked at any distance.”
“It was our can to lose, not yours.”
“We’ve got a deal. You share everything with me and I help keep you alive,” Oliver said.
“Okay, so you just lost one-fifth of a can of bear repellant. Nobody likes a whiner, Douglas. You seem to already have forgotten that you used my son as a shield. You’ve forgotten. I won’t. When we get back to the house, we have some things to work out.”
Oliver started to reply. Jack cut him off. “And if I hadn’t tried to make friends, we’d be dead. How many of them did you think you could get with the bear spray before they killed all of us?”
The old man did not answer her question. He moved on quickly to his plans. “The only reason he let you have the hiking boots was they couldn’t possibly wear every pair they had. We should get some guns and come back and take this place. That’s exactly what we should do. They’re just a bunch of kids.”
“Right!” Anna said. “They’re just a bunch of kids trying to survive, so leave them alone.”
“We made a deal with them, Douglas,” Jack added. “I got this peachy bunch of plastic bags, too, so quid pro quo and yay, me.” She nodded to her children to follow her and began the trek home.
“Shopping is much more complicated than it used to be,” Anna said.
“Someday there will be more to life than this.” Jack hoped she sounded more sure than she felt.
“And we’ll be able to say we knew Baby Girl before she was a star,” Anna said.
“When her father threatened to bash in our heads to protect his looted stash,” Oliver added. “It’s a sweet, inspiring story. Makes me glad to be alive.”
As they walked back down Fanshawe Park Road, the hulk of the abandoned ladder truck loomed up, now black in the deepening darkness.
“It shouldn’t get this dark so fast.”
“It’s the smoke,” Jack said.
“I can smell it now,” Anna said. “It’s blocking out the sun.”
“The wind shifted again. It was bound to happen,” Oliver said. “We might have to bug out tonight.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about the ‘we’ part, Douglas. I’ll talk to Theo about your place in our matrix.”
Jack made an unconscious decision and led them closer to the fire engine’s wreck this time. They made their way down the middle of the street rather than walk past the graffitied wall. They couldn’t read the messages without using their flashlights, but none of the expedition felt the urge to look at the wall again. The messages to and from the dead seemed a curse and an omen.
None of them said anything as they neared the broken truck.
Every ruin is a warning of what’s to come for everything, Jack thought. That sounded like something her husband would say. It was as if Theo’s ghost walked beside her, whispering his obsessive thoughts about entropy.
She answered his thought: We’ve been married too long, sweetie.We know each other so well, we don’t even need to speak anymore.
Though they knew the truck’s color in daylight, the darkness was so deep now they couldn’t see the engine’s red paint. They had forgotten how dark the world was without xenon gas streetlights and the ambient glow of a million burning bulbs.
Jack touched the truck’s cool metal with her palm as she passed. “If we could find these guys…if we could get one company of firefighters together, we’d all be okay, you know that? Touch the truck for luck.” Like a talisman from an ancient world, she thought.
“Like the opposite of walking under a ladder, huh?” Anna suggested.
A Latin phrase came to Jaimie. He’d studied it that afternoon. It was: anguis in herba, meaning hidden danger.
It was only four blocks, but it seemed much farther in the dark. They moved slowly, following Jack’s bobbing circle of light.
A dozen pairs of eyes followed their progress — wary and fierce — unseen and circling, closer and closer. The ragged creatures, drooling and impatient, ached with hunger. Only meat could slake them now.
Wolves howl louder when food's around
Misericordia Drive awaited them like a dark maw. The wind picked up and pushed them back, as if warning them away from home.
As they rounded the corner to the drive, Jaimie broke away from Anna, shot forward and grabbed the old man’s walking stick, pulling hard. Oliver instinctively resisted. Jack wrapped her arms around her son’s shoulders, pulling him back.
“What is it, Jaimie?”
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “What is it, Lassie? Did Timmy fall down the well?”
The boy pointed, not to Douglas Oliver’s house, but to his own. Flashlight beams moved back and forth through the Spencer’s windows. Strangers were in their home.
The salvage party had almost walked into the middle of their street. They moved to the side, sticking close to the shadow of a high hedge, to get a closer look. The Spencer’s couch was stuck half way out the living room’s shattered window.
“They didn’t see us.” Jack touched her son’s head and thanked him. The boy ignored her, peering instead toward the darkness behind them.
Anna crept forward, touched her mother’s shoulder and pointed beyond their house to the Bendham house. Marjorie Bendham stood in her front yard. She carried a large flashlight and paced. Bently stood in the Spencer’s driveway, talking to the old woman. They couldn’t hear their exchange.
A moment later, a man hooted and laughed as another began to howl like a wolf baying at the moon. Jack was reminded of the westerns her husband was so fond of, the ones where, at the beginning of the movie, the sheriff has been shot dead and chaos reigns at the local saloon. “Bently’s finally come back with friends.”
Friends and fiends and one little r, Jaimie thought. Funny how close those words are. Could that be someone’s etymological joke? A little nod to how easy it is for one thing to become another thing entirely? When he got back to Oliver’s house, he intended to go look up the word origins of friends and fiends.
The man who bayed like a wolf howled again, louder and crazier this time.
There were, the boy thought, many examples of la
nguage quirks in English. Irony, for instance, means that what one says is the opposite of what one means. The idea was ludicrous to Jaimie, and much more alarming than strange men wandering his home.
* * *
“What are they doing?” Anna asked.
“So far, stealing stuff that can be replaced, I suppose. Your Dad must be going crazy with worry. Thank God he’s safe on Oliver’s couch,” Jack said. Well, I assume he’s safe, the ugly thought came unbidden.
“We have to get back to Oliver’s house and let Dad know we’re okay. We’ll go through the backyards,” Anna said.
“Assert, engage, attack,” Jack agreed. She covered her flashlight with her fingers. In the faint glow, Jack could just make out the faces of her children. Anna looked terrified. She saw Jaimie’s face in profile and envied him. He had no anger or dismay. His mind was busy elsewhere, wrestling with what mysteries she could not guess.
No. That was unfair. He’d heard the men from half a block away, seen the flashlights and he’d known it meant danger. He’d warned them. Her son was still a mystery to her. However, under the stress of plague days, she’d seen more glimmers of what might be going on in her son’s head than she had through all the mundanity of their lives before Sutr came to town. Jaimie’s wiring might be pathological from a clinical perspective, but he was more functional than she’d ever expected in this crisis. That was good because, with home invaders threatening their safety, she needed Jaimie to be more than the strange, distracted kid with a book in his hand.
Jack inhaled deeply to quell her growing fear and anger. She turned off the flashlight so she could take her children’s hands in hers. “Stick close behind me.”
Oliver rose from a crouch and shook his head. “I’m too old to be running around climbing fences,” he said. “I’m going to have a chat with these fellows,” he said.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 27