Gus bent his head, pretending humility. “Seeing God’s signs that way? It was like all that death finally meant something. All that misery? All those lives ending? They served a purpose no one could have foreseen. But God knew. God’s high up. God sees the road ahead. All that sacrifice meant I could live if I looked below the gritty surface of tragedy to find the meaning of things. Everything means something else if you look at it right.”
His audience usually looked at him like he was a little bit crazy then. That was okay. He’d brought them down and up and now he yanked their comfortable seats in reality out from under their butts.
“In those days, I wasn’t the man you know now. I went by the name of Gus: former drug addict, homeless person and third-rate fiddler. The name I never used was my middle name. It’s the name you know me by now: Xavier. When I was running, I knew those Xs were a sign meant for me. Xavier is a Basque name. It means ‘owns a new house.’ Thanks to God’s mercy and sweet people like you, I do own a new house.”
Now was the time to smile slowly and let them see the beatific spread of it, from ear to ear. He’d tell this story for the rest of his life, but the next line was the most powerful of all.
“Trusting and following those Xs and that inner voice? I took that family I didn’t know round in a big circle, from hiding place to hiding place, until we were smack back at Pier 11. We found a seaplane my new friend could fly. Follow me, and I’ll take you to God’s promised safety, too.”
Then Xavier would pass the collection plate and hope for sugar beets and apples.
His story was a very effective lie.
When you turn on a spit, turned into stew?
The only barrier to the north was in the minds of those bold enough to brave Mackinac Bridge. Someone had tried to stop the migration to Canada inside the Michigan border.
As the Spencers approached the bridge, each corpse’s state of decay was a clue to a grisly timeline. The skeletons came first.
As they made their way forward, closer to the bridge, the bodies became more filled out and distinct. Clothes were torn. Flesh was rotten and the bodies lay closer together until they became an uninterrupted buffet for gulls to rip and tear and feast upon. Bullet-riddled bodies lined the bridge: two walls of bones and flesh all the way across Lake Huron.
Mrs. Bendham gasped and cried at the sight unfolding before them. She reached out to touch Anna’s shoulder and gripped hard until the girl relented and offered her hand. The old woman grasped so tight, Anna’s fingers went white. Mrs. Bendham closed her eyes to the carnage, but Anna stared out the window.
Jack ordered her daughter to close her eyes, too.
“No, Mom.”
“Anna! I don’t want you to wake up screaming with nightmares tonight.”
“No,” Anna said. “I’ll look. Years from now, I’ll tell my children what I saw here.” She gazed at tangled horrors as the van bumped along, over a sprawl of bodies. The uncaring Sutr virus had not done this. People had done this to other people.
Many of those murdered had no eyes now, but their gaping jaws suggested anger, fear, pain and surprise. Anna saw white bones rising from torn, sallow flesh as the skeletons emerged from their hiding places.
“If I don’t look,” Anna said, "it's not right. Someone has to bear witness. If I don’t look, it’s like saying this doesn't matter or it means I won’t be around later to pass it on. Someday soon, the animals will finish eating and what will be left but me and my memory? Not looking is like…”
“Giving up,” Theo said. “Yes. Look, Anna. It’s a heavy load, but someone who can tell the story should carry the memory.”
Jaimie surprised his sister by reaching out and grasping her free hand. He squeezed gently.
His father held the boy’s free hand. “There really are no dictionary words for such atrocities, are there, son? It would be obscene if there was such a word. There shouldn’t be just one word for this. Anna’s right. Someday, she will tell a long story about all she saw. The mothers holding their babies tight to their chests, trying to protect them from a rain of bullets. All those people, now not people. Reduced to meat.”
Jaimie studied the dead. There were no energy signatures to see. Whatever energy made the people human was gone. There was something strangely spiritual about this knowledge. If the energy was gone, that meant it might have traveled elsewhere. Since energy couldn’t be created nor destroyed, it had to go somewhere, didn’t it?
Jaimie knew that, sometimes, as if reluctant to go, energy hung on once the body that sustained it was dead. He saw no evidence of that on the bridge.
The bridge denizens were rodents and gulls and blackbirds. Their teeth and beaks pulled long strips of flesh as they pecked and scurried among the fallen. The animals’ heads shook as they winnowed the dead. Some rats, and even a large snake, peered back at the boy from inside hollowed torsos. The animals found new homes made of rotting meat and sheltered under shattered cages of bone.
* * *
Jack drove on through the carnage. She tried to remember a prayer. None came.
At St. Ignace, the bodies were piled so high and deep that, on either side, the reaching hands of the dead brushed the sides of the van. The bodies were fresher here and, as the van progressed, the tires crunched over thousands of spent shells as well as bones.
There were no backpacks or suitcases or signs that any of the dead had anything but the torn and bloodied clothes on their backs. Closing the vents and rolling the windows tight was no defense against the acrid stench that rose from Death’s debris.
Of the gunmen and thieves who had murdered and robbed these refugees, there was no sign. All that was left was their shrine to cruelty.
No roadblocks, nor Customs checkpoints nor gates nor man-made barriers stopped the Spencers at the border. No one manned the booth to the toll road. The Spencers and Mrs. Bendham passed into Canada at Sault St. Marie.
The stench of the dead followed them for miles. They would have to carry the memories of the Massacre at Mackinac for the rest of their lives.
Anna would discover that no matter how many times she told the story, memory’s burden never got lighter in the telling.
The Nexus is the nerve plexus of hopes and dreams
Northern Ontario was much like the countryside in Michigan, though the Spencers saw more deer and no people. Windows were boarded. Evidence of people could only be found in wary shadows, debris and the ghosts of what used to be. In each little village they passed, store windows were shattered.
“I knew Canada was big,” Anna complained, “but we aren’t even halfway across Ontario yet. This is ridiculous.”
It was to become an even slower trip. The northern route along the Trans-Canada highway was blocked. A military radio transmitter was still operational. An automated message warned that all roads past Sudbury were closed.
The bulletin explained, in both English and French, that soldiers from a base called Petawawa had closed the road east of North Bay. There’d been a massive radiation leak at the Chalk River nuclear reactor and all of Algonquin Provincial Park was irradiated.
“Irradiated! Oh my God! We’ve got to get out of here! Roll the windows up!”
Mrs. Bendham covered her face, too, though Jaimie was pretty sure that wouldn’t help.
Anna snatched up the map and told her mother to turn south toward Parry Sound. “There’s no direct route, but it’s the closest way I see to head south and get around this mess.”
They siphoned gas from cars along the way. There were few cars here and almost all of them held the rotting corpses of Sutr-X victims. They had to stop more often, taking every opportunity to refuel.
“You think it will get easier?” Anna asked. “You know, seeing all these bodies?”
“Yes,” Theo answered.
“Probably,” Jack said, “but I don’t think it should.”
New signs warned that all routes into Toronto were mined and the city wa
s quarantined. Several signs declared: No one in! No one out!
As they made their way southeast, concrete barriers blocked the road and they were forced to take ever smaller roads. Past the city of Barrie, ramps and roads were piled high with cars like stacks in a wrecking yard. There was no way around them unless the Spencers abandoned their van. They had too far to go to risk that, so they made their way east through farmland.
The Spencers followed backroads until they came to Highway 7. Long driveways led to farmhouses and barns ringed with cars and tractors parked end to end. Sandbags lined porches everywhere.
“They’ve circled the wagons,” Theo said. He pointed at the mown grass. “Everybody must be using their fuel to keep the perimeter cut back. No sneaking up on them. It would take quite an assault to get in there without getting shot.”
Beside the farmhouses, red barn rooves were painted with various messages: No vagrants!
Trespassers will be shot!
Jesus Loves You!
* * *
Jaimie stared at the road, losing himself to the hypnotizing flow of the grain and weave of the dirt and pavement underneath their wheels. The road calmed him, but he did not want to sleep.
In dreams, he saw the pregnant woman from the ship. The two little girls always appeared to him in frilly, white dresses. They were afraid all the time because of the one who called herself a goddess. He saw the man from the Brickyard who wasn’t a man anymore.
Jaimie missed the nights before the plague when he did not dream. He usually only watched the people in dreams, but sometimes something made him speak to them. He did not understand what made him do that. Speaking was so much easier in dreams.
When sleep did claim him, he hoped each time he’d be transported to the sunny birch forest. Soft, cool moss meant tranquility. He wanted to stay there and talk with the trees forever.
* * *
Official-looking signs read: Quarantine Zone, Turn back. These were augmented with spray painted warnings that read simply: Repent!
Another sign by an abandoned farmer’s market read: Toronto closed due to lack of humanity. Someone had come along later and crossed that out to replace humanity with humans.
Across an overpass was written with a stencil, Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
The Latin translation popped into Jaimie’s head. He’d read that in his Latin primer. He could still feel the letters under his fingertips like a bloodied blade: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
“The Divine Comedy,” Theo said. “Hell’s welcome. How…appropriate.”
Jack pointed at the message as they passed under it. “Dante’s Inferno was your father’s favorite undergrad course. He didn’t have to take that one. It was supposed to be a bird course, but it was always his favorite.”
Jaimie watched as his mother’s aura changed again to a festering yellow. He hadn’t created a new poem lately, but it occurred to him he should name this particular shade of yellow.
Assidia: The noon day demon — extreme ennui, bored and restless at the same time, hating the moment where you are, fantasizing about being elsewhere. The fear of repetition. For centuries people thought only monks could suffer assidia. Mother, you are suffused in Assidia Yellow, Jaimie thought.
“What do you suppose all those survivalists are doing right now?” Jack asked.
“Catching up on their reading, I imagine,” Anna said. “I checked out those websites early on. They seemed to spend an awful lot of time talking about their guns.”
“We could use a gun or two, don’t you think?” Mrs. Bendham said, giving voice to what Jack was thinking.
“Sure,” Anna replied without looking back at the old woman. “But I imagine right now they should be spending more time figuring out how to skin a chicken— ”
“Pluck,” Jaimie corrected her.
“Oh, bro! When will you ever shut up? Give the guy countless billions of deaths and suddenly he wants to take over the mic and not let go!”
“Anna. We encourage your brother to speak, right?”
“Yes, mother. Survivalists only focused on one skill set. How about how to pluck a chicken and grow a carrot and make a web browser out of a tree stump?” She turned to her brother. “Sorry I made fun of you, Ears. I miss Trent something awful. And e-mail.”
Jack smiled. “We went for a long time without it, before there was an Internet.”
“Yeah,” Anna said, “but that’s like me saying I don’t miss jetpacks…well…bad example. We won’t have jetpacks ever now. Still, I bet you miss e-mail as much as I do.”
Jack nodded. “Oh, God, yes. And Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and hot food and hot showers. And beds. I really miss my bed.”
“I bet you miss sleep, Mom.”
Jack stared at the road. “I can go a bit longer before we stop again.”
“C’mon. Let me take the wheel for a change. Let someone else drive before you put us in a ditch. You tell me I’m stubborn and then you refuse to share the driving.”
“You are stubborn. Okay. You drive.” Jack relinquished the wheel to Anna and switched places. Before Anna adjusted the mirrors and shifted the van into gear, Jack fell asleep.
Jaimie wondered if The Way of Things would ever send him into his mother’s dreams. To the forces at work, Jacqueline Spencer did not seem to matter at all.
Boils of hawks, clouds of bats and sentient trees
When Wiggins was a soldier, he’d taken ephedrine-based psychotropics to reduce anxiety and stress in battle. The drugs made soldiers fearless. Being a Sutr Alpha was so much better than any of those drugs. His tribe could choose to drive, of course, but they preferred to run.
Running at full speed, he felt a burst of energy unlike anything he’d experienced. He called to his followers, “Stretch out! Stretch out!” As their strides lengthened, they felt indefatigable and indestructible.
Their first experiment with their new and improved bodies was to run down seven deer. Normal humans worked together centuries ago to chase deer to exhaustion. For humans, it could take all day, working together. The Alphas chased three of seven deer down within half an hour and Wiggins brought one down by himself in forty minutes.
Sinking his teeth into a doe’s shoulder, Wiggins looked up into the eyes of a female Alpha. She still wore a tattered nurses’s uniform. The fabric that was once starched white ran red with fresh blood over a spray of old, black, crusted blood. From her crimson chin to her long, bare legs, he could see and feel the strength in her mind and body.
“You feel it, too, don’t you?” he grinned. “The energy?”
She smiled behind the long blonde hair hanging in her face. “I can see it. Every cell is alive! I’m tingling! When we brought down the doe, I could hear her heartbeat. I could see her fear. And it tasted like…lemon meringue pie. Sinking my teeth into her neck feels like…” She shrugged.
“First love.”
She pulled her hair back and smiled wider. “Exactly! We’re high!”
That night, at the edge of the Alphas’ encampment, the thing that had been Wiggins and the female who used to be a nurse, mated for the first time. They moaned and snarled and screamed and bucked. Naked and uninhibited, other Alphas paired off to enjoy each other’s bodies in a moonlit field. Despite the night’s chill, the Alphas needed no firelight. They mated in the soft grass and they didn’t care who saw.
“What are we? What are we? What are we?” she cried out as he lay atop her, meeting each savage thrust.
“We are what we always wanted.” He bared white teeth. “Beyond fear.”
* * *
Later, the messenger appeared in his dreams. He somehow knew the boy slept in a van traveling through the night. Beside the boy sat a man in white. He took him to be the boy’s father. “I must speak with him!”
The man nudged Jaimie awake gently and the boy opened his eyes. Instead of eyes, two mirrors reflected the Alpha’s face.
“I
know your name is Jaimie Spencer,” he told the boy. “I heard them call you by name when I was strapped to that table. But what are you?”
“An instrument of The Way of Things.”
“What’s that?”
“The Way of Things is all around us, shouting in many voices all the time. All you have to do is look at things differently. That’s all I’ve ever done, so the Things chose me as their Way. I speak with one small voice so you might hear me. But I doubt you will. You’re an Alpha and I’m still human.”
“The doctor named me an Alpha, right?”
“A weapon, yes.”
“I’m more than a weapon!”
“You believe you are new, but you’re not. You’re something very old that’s waited for eons to reemerge. You are more lizard than brain,” the boy said.
“No!”
“You have merely rediscovered arte perditae. You are a practitioner of lost arts, like me.”
“You’re wrong, boy! I am the next evolution of the species.” His irritation made the vampire feel like he was swimming out of sleep, clutching uselessly at a fleeting dream. He couldn’t lose hold of the boy. The boy was the key to the mysteries.
“I used to live on Misericordia Drive.” Jaimie shook his head sadly. “You know, people have names. Wild animals do not. You have no name. Things with no names are without misericordia. Names matter. Names have meanings. You are perfect and single-minded. You are a beautiful animal, but you lack a name and misericordia.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Exactly.”
The Alpha tried to stay with the boy, but his anger drew him out of sleep. “What does it mean?” he screamed.
The more he fought to stay in the dream, the more he pushed it away. In the last second before opening his white eyes, he saw the woman behind the white curtain. He was sure she was screaming to be let into his dream, pleading to be heard, but the boy kept her out.
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