This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3

by Robert Chazz Chute

  “Yes. Good.”

  “I don’t need your blessing, Doctor. I’ve got Aasa and Aastha. As long as I have them, you’ll find I won’t need your condescending forgiveness or understanding.”

  “Sorry. You’re not what I expected, Aadi. I’m sorry if I was…we’re all just having to adjust to a lot of change very quickly.”

  The security guard knelt by Sinjin-Smythe’s side. “From now on, Doctor, we learn to live with the Ghost and the Darkness or we die horribly. Do you know the story?”

  Sinjin-Smythe shook his head.

  “In Kenya in 1898, two rogue lions killed 140 people working on a railroad. There were only two lions, but they lived to kill. That’s what the plague victims have become.”

  “I feel like we’re more the plague victims now. More so than those…those things.”

  “I won’t laugh at you if you call them zombies, Doctor. That’s what they look like to me.”

  Another shout reached them from the shore. Two of the infected chased a young woman, her long, blonde hair flew behind her like a flag. She screamed for help as she ran. “You! On the boat! I need a ride! Help me!”

  Sinjin-Smythe began to stand but Aadi gripped his shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. If we get close, those things will jump on the boat with her.”

  Before Sinjin-Smythe could reply, two more men, a woman and a child — zombies all — rushed to meet the fleeing woman. They crashed into her and brought her down.

  The things were animals, yes, but as they pinned their victim, Sinjin-Smythe was sure he detected triumph and joy amid the guttural, snarled shouts. The joy of the violators competed with the terrified screams of their victim. Her screams followed the boat as they swept on and the Doctor prayed the monsters would tear at her throat so her suffering would end.

  The Doctor and the security guard were quiet for some time before Sinjin-Smythe broke the thoughtful silence. “Maybe whatever they’ve become…maybe they are what we always were. What if Sutr just let the lion out of its cage?”

  “I can’t believe this is something at all natural, Doctor. If I believed that, I wouldn’t have had children.”

  “I don’t have a kid. Not quite. If I did….”

  Aadi patted him on the back. “If we’re to survive, we must be clever and quick. We have to be smarter than the Ghost and the Darkness.”

  “But what kind of future are we fighting for? What are we fighting so hard for? To be eaten by monsters or…I mean, what if we survive those things but have to die slowly of something else? How many cardiologists and oncologists are going to make it?”

  “You’re a doctor for a start.”

  “Not that kind of doctor.”

  “And McInerney’s a dentist, so there’s that.”

  “You aren’t hearing me, Aadi! If it’s going to be like that,” — Sinjin-Smythe pointed back to where the huddle of cannibals made a horrid meal of their victim — “why survive?”

  “My answers are sleeping,” Aadi said. He stood to go below with Dayo and his daughters.

  Sinjin-Smythe thought of his flat in Cambridge and all his dead friends in the lab. If he’d thought to warn them to get out of the building before he called Merritt at the CDC, he’d have more allies now. All he had left were a few documents, the cruel note Ava left him and the memory stick with their lab notes on the Sutr virus.

  He began to cry again. He thought about what he believed about the human race. He wished he possessed the young security guard’s optimism. But, of course, Aadi had something to live for. Aadi had children so he didn’t have the luxury of self-pity.

  But Craig Sinjin-Smythe? He who had somehow let a worse variant than the world’s worst plagues loose on the world? At that moment, it seemed not merely self-pity, but only right that he should drop over the side, swim to shore and receive proper justice by tooth and nail.

  The doctor pulled out his phone, fished the cell’s batteries out of his pocket and powered up the device.

  Surely my beautiful Ava is dead by now, he thought.

  On a whim, he texted Ava.

  He wrote:

  To my Juliet: I still will stay with thee, and never from this palace of dim night depart again.

  I’m truly so sorry that, whatever you needed, I couldn’t give it to you. I wanted so much more than this for you, for us and for our child. And so it comes to this.

  The doctor pressed Send.

  He climbed to his feet, dropped his bag to the deck and stepped to the rail, arms stretched to each side. The wind whipped his long hair, its cold fingers pulled at his shirt. He put one foot on top of the rail, ready to dive.

  The phone rang.

  2

  This Plague of Days

  Season Two

  Season 2, Episode 1

  This Plague of Days

  Robert Chazz Chute

  Season 2

  Episode 1

  We are unprepared for Death because we pretend it’s not happening everywhere, all the time. Curious, that.

  *

  Whips and chains will make you moan.

  Sticks and stones will shatter bone.

  Blame yourselves, my enemies.

  Your words and deeds incite me.

  *

  There is still magic in the world.

  It’s coming back and it’s pissed.

  ~Notes from The Last Cafe

  *

  Give sorrow words; the grief, that does not speak,

  Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Miles away in the Last Cafe

  The Spencer family began their escape at dawn.

  From the back of the family van, Mrs. Bendham asked, “Is that fog?”

  “Smoke,” Anna replied, her eyes fixed on the billowing columns climbing toward the sky.

  Jack took a circuitous route that burned more gas. She steered her family away from a glimpse of the smoking ruins of their neighborhood in daylight. Maybe the seeds she’d left behind would sprout and grow through the ashes, but it was time to run. It was a long trip east to the hope of safety.

  She drove slowly through empty streets. Brown rabbits, large and small, dotted long-grassed lawns everywhere. She briefly considered trying to run one over or chase one with a stick, but the lieutenant was still out there with whatever Wolf Pack was left. They had more than the plague to worry about now.

  “Before we leave, I’ve got something I have to do. Everybody stay in the van.”

  Jack parked in front of a low brick ranch house. She shut off the engine but left the keys in the ignition and sprinted for the front door. She needed a tribe, a wagon train and numbers. That’s where safety lay. When mob rule is all there is, build a mob.

  Someone had painted a sloppy orange X across the front door. Jack took a breath of fresh air. She was out of medical masks, so she pulled her dirty carpenter’s mask over her mouth and nose. She pushed on the doorbell and went cold. Electricity afforded a million little luxuries and it was gone. Despite everything, she was still working on automatic.

  “Brandy? Brandy!” She pounded on the door, her fist a hammer. The door yawned open easily. Jack looked back at the van and wished she had thought to bring her heavy flashlight. Anna waved for her to come back.

  Jack walked into Brandy Benedetto’s house. She knew right away Brandy didn’t live here anymore. Her friend would never have allowed this mess. The house had been searched by people without mercy, probably the Wolf Pack. But many had gone feral since the Sutr virus struck.

  Jack met Brandy on Anna’s first day of school. Each was a weepy mother holding a nervous child’s hand. Brandy had a son, Ben, and two deadbeat ex-husbands. Her looks made the frumpier mothers joke that Brandy’s moniker was her stripper name.

  Jack hadn’t spoken to her friend since the phones had gone dead. Brandy sounded healthy and optimistic when they’d last spoken. She said it was time for society to get better. Out of this terrible
flu pandemic, Brandy was sure people would remember what was important.

  “People will pull together,” she told Jack. “Hang in there. Soon we’ll be knocking back champers again.”

  Then the phones went dead.

  An acrid smell was an ominous clue that pushed Jack away and pulled her forward at the same time. The odor got stronger as Jack picked her way through the house. She paused for a quick glance through the kitchen door. Every drawer and cabinet had been trashed. The searchers weren’t just scavengers, but mad vandals. Stealing wasn’t enough. Everything had to be destroyed.

  The refrigerator lay on its side. Brandy had saved for two years to buy a new one. When it arrived from Sears, Jack brought over a cake to congratulate her. They’d toasted the ancient junked refrigerator with champagne — Brandy always had champagne on hand.

  “Goodbye, harvest gold! Hello, stainless steel!” Brandy said as they clinked champagne flutes. The remains of those flutes were probably amongst the shattered glass that littered the ceramic tile floor.

  Brandy raised Ben alone. She’d divorced, married again, divorced again and somehow scraped by on a freelance writer’s income, mostly writing for travel magazines. She did all her research online and never traveled anywhere. Every Christmas she was especially anxious for the checks to arrive, writing batches of greeting card rhymes to fund presents for her son. She managed to get by without alimony and only sporadic child support.

  “I don’t know what it is about me, Jack,” Brandy said. “Nine decent guys could walk by but I go for the tenth every time. It’s like I’ve got reverse radar. No good instincts at all when it comes to men.”

  The women met at school every day and from there had grown the best friendship Jack ever had. The other parents steered clear of Jack because of Jaimie. His big ears and distracted eyes made his classmates nervous and sometimes cruel. When it was time to pick up Anna from elementary school, Jack stood holding Jaimie’s hand, alone amidst a crowd of parents. Just as Jaimie avoided Jack’s pleading eyes, the other parents looked away, making a show of not staring at the little boy who always looked sad.

  “It’s lonely,” Brandy had said, by way of greeting. “Like we’re the hobos trying to get the waiter’s attention at a French restaurant.” Brandy didn’t suffer discomfort or embarrassment. She called it out and named it.

  Later, when the doctors said Jaimie was a selective mute —developmentally disabled, “possibly on the autistic spectrum, but trainable” — Jack cried on Brandy’s shoulder.

  Theo, usually the rational, straight-forward one, infuriated her. “We’ll see,” he said. “Jaimie’s just quiet. He’s a hard one to test and measure. What do labels really help anyway?”

  Brandy let Jack cry a long time before suggesting Theo might be right.

  “But that’s wishful thinking,” Jack replied. “Ever since he was a baby, it’s like there’s no there there.”

  “Sweetie, I’ve been told my dreams are too big. I don’t know what the alternative is. Facing reality square on makes it easier for reality to kick you in the guts.” Then she pulled champagne flutes from the refrigerator — chilled and ready. “Let’s get drunk.”

  Jack, eyeliner smeared down her cheeks, raised a glass and managed the beginning of a smile. Together, they toasted, “To trainable!”

  Jack had accepted that Jaimie was functioning on a lower level. She’d been told acceptance was the first step toward progress, as if there was a twelve-step program out of Jaimie’s narrow little world. Wherever Jaimie lived most of the time, she was sure his mind was much farther than twelve steps away.

  She fought what she’d been told. An elementary school teacher told her with cool condescension, “all parents of low functioning kids fight it…at first.”

  “He’s reading the dictionary at five!”

  The teacher smiled and nodded sagely and told her that was “merely Jaimie’s tactile fixation. Notice how he always has his hand on the page, as if he’s caressing the words? That doesn’t connote comprehension. Be glad he doesn’t fixate on other things, like feeling his food or something.”

  Brandy hugged Jack kindly and sat her at the kitchen table. “Darlin’, autism or Asperger’s…it’s just a label. What’s a label going to do for Jaimie? Let’s take this one day at a time and see if your little boy comes out of his shell one day.”

  The “one day at a time” comment raised Jacks’ hackles. More talk like Jaimie’s weirdness was some kind of addictive behavior instead of tangles in the wiring of her son’s brain. “This is more than a little case of shyness, Brandy.”

  “Of course, and labels will get Jaimie the help he needs in the school system. But don’t make labels your life or his. Labels are limits.”

  “I think Wittgenstein said something like that. ‘When you label me, you limit me.’”

  “I was quoting Oprah. Who are you talking about?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Jack, my point is, I don’t worry about what I can’t control and you shouldn’t, either. My mother labels me irresponsible because I don’t pay my credit cards off each month. She told me she’ll start respecting me when I have a job where I can pay all my bills.”

  “Nobody I know pays off the whole bill anymore,” Jack said. “What’d you tell her?”

  “That respect isn’t something you hold out until I do something you want me to do that’s none of your business. It’s easy to give somebody their propers once they’ve already made it. Everybody loves the rich, famous success story. Give me my due before I’m rich and famous, girl! Do that and you might impress me. I hung up on that bitch.”

  Jack remembered that story well. It was her first genuine laugh since her son’s diagnosis. The doctors were careful to call their findings tentative. They talked about “heavy tendencies” and, since selective mutism is a cardinal sign of anxiety, not autism, the experts disagreed. His interest in words was useless to a selective mute, they pointed out, but all agreed Jaimie was “an unusual and fascinating case.”

  They said that like it helped. They said it as if her son’s disability was somehow about them and their ghoulish fascinations. “No matter how much I love Jaimie, no mother wants a fascinating case for a son,” Jack told Brandy bitterly.

  Over time, Jack granted that her husband’s delusions about their son weren’t, perhaps, so grandiose. Jaimie had spoken more since the Sutr virus struck than he had in the past year, maybe two. Still, his unexpected pronouncements unnerved her. Jaimie had a knack for non sequiturs that weren’t exactly non sequiturs. His tiny scraps of commentary — garbled telegraphy — hinted that he had been paying attention to everything, after all.

  Sometimes those surprising hints at lucidity made Jack go cold. She wondered what hurtful jokes or dark complaints she might have let slip in front of her son? Had Jaimie understood? It was like going to the bathroom in front of a pet and suddenly discovering your beagle can talk and has some thoughts to share.

  But maybe Jaimie’s tiny bit of progress was gone. Since their home had exploded, most of the time Jaimie stared at his dictionaries. Sometimes he stared at his hands, squeezing them to fists and relaxing them, watching for…what?

  The stench grew worse. Jack took a deep breath through her mouth and moved forward, deeper into Brandy’s home.

  We count every cost, each rueful day

  Dr. Craig Sinjin-Smythe watched the little girls sleep, one on either side of Aadi Vermer. They snuggled under one big blanket, tight to their father’s warmth. The North Atlantic rocked the trio as the boat sliced west.

  The virologist had read that great losses, if suffered early in life, were better endured. He suspected he was long past the age he could dismiss all that was lost. Perhaps these little girls would forget what they had seen along the Thames. And for all that was lost? They could not miss what they had never known.

  But maybe that was just something people said. It sounded wise until he considered that his baby was
alive in Ava’s womb. He ached for the child and the waiting world.

  Sinjin-Smythe left Aadi with his daughters and climbed above deck. He couldn’t bear to look at the sleeping father with his children anymore.

  Dr. Neil McInerney stood at the wheel of the Shepherd of Myddvai. Since his wife had been taken by the infected, the dentist rarely left his post. He refused to look at Aadi. McInerney watched the sea, the compass and the sails.

  Dayo stood at McInerney’s side. She turned to greet Sinjin-Smythe. “That’s the southern coast of Ireland off to the right!” Despite the cold wind and the ugly circumstances of their escape from London, Dayo’s smile was broad.

  McInerney grunted. “Starboard. Right is starboard. Left is port.”

  Dayo rolled her eyes but said, “Yes, Captain.”

  Sinjin-Smythe pulled up the collar on the jacket he’d borrowed and stepped close to McInerney. “How much longer?”

  “Another few hours to Cork. We can load up on supplies there.”

  “Cork’s too big. Big is dangerous.”

  “Why?”

  “Big means…more contagion, more infected people coming at us.”

  “So what’s my course?”

  Sinjin-Smythe peered over McInerney’s shoulder at the little map pinned under glass by the wheel. He tapped the glass. “There! Make for Dungarvan.”

  “Why there?”

  “Its bay is too shallow for big ships. Shiva couldn’t have put any of the infected ashore there, I don’t think.”

  “How do you know?” Dayo asked. “Are you some sort of genius about everything?”

  Sinjin-Smythe gave a bitter laugh. “Not at all. About some things I’m terribly stupid, but Dungarvan is a beach resort. I went on vacation there with the woman who was to be my wife. She asked me to move in with her on the beach at midnight. I was stupid enough to agree.”