Its eyes burned with white fire.
Chattering classes fall on their asses
The next day, the Spencers walked into the dulling sun. Jack hoped the weak heat would dry them and the sunlight might somehow purify them. Though Jack’s breath was soon as heavy as her backpack — she cursed herself for not taking better care of her body — she found fatigue was easier to dismiss in the presence of horror. She desperately wanted to get beyond the block of cars. Past this dam of metal and flesh, they’d find a vehicle and continue to Maine. Papa Spence’s farm awaited, and maybe her brother-in-law Cliff, too. Theo hadn’t gotten along with his twin. She hoped Cliff had mellowed in the years since they’d last met. The plague changed everyone, so why not him, too?
And what if Lieutenant Carron found a way to get to the Corners faster? Jack saw herself open the door to the kitchen at the farm, relieved to have finally found a haven. What if the man who had pointed a rifle at her face, at her daughter’s face, waited there, a shotgun aimed at her midsection?
Carron was so angry. There was no reasoning with a monster. Jack saw herself open the door to the kitchen at the farm. Carron would warm himself by the wood stove. Papa Spence would be dead on the floor at his feet. She wouldn’t have time to plead before he pulled the trigger and cut her in two.
“How long do you think Carron will stay with Xavier’s cult?” Anna asked. It was as if her daughter had read her thoughts. That was happening more lately, in fits and starts.
“If he’s not already on his way, picking his way through the wreckage behind us, I’d be surprised,” Theo said.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “The cult looked kind of comfortable. He’ll probably stay with them.” But her tone held no conviction.
Theo whispered to Jaimie. “Did you see that? It’s spreading. It’s not as strong as between you and me, but it’s spreading. Your mother was just thinking of Carron and Anna brought him up at the same time.”
“Synchronicity,” Jaimie whispered back.
“I think we can expect more of it. It’s like…the fewer people there are, the more of a share we get.” Theo squeezed his son’s hand. “When all the secrets are revealed, I wonder what we’ll wonder about next?”
“Next.” Jaimie pondered the word. It was powerful and important and filled with excitement. The x cut across his tongue in a way that bled hope. He wanted to hold on to that word. For so thin a vessel, it was full of possibility.
* * *
On the road, two seagulls squabbled over ribbons and scraps, staging a tug-of-war over white meat. Despite her promise to avert her eyes, Anna did look. The corpse’s face was gone. The torn scalp stretched out in the birds’ beaks, a long tangled splay of string across black and red pavement. The long hair suggested to Anna that the thing lying before her, exposed and obscene, had been a woman once. A vulture went about its work, its head in the corpse’s ruined belly, ignoring the screeching gulls. Intent on its meal, the bird raised its ugly, bald head, ratcheting back and forth and up and down, to tear and to swallow.
Anna knew she should turn away but found she could not. The dead woman’s abdomen had bloated and burst in a riotous stench amid roiling, white maggots. The bird’s head and neck disappeared into the gore to its hunched shoulders and came up again to tilt its head back, to feast, forcing a large, pink chunk into its gullet.
The girl bent to throw up. The moment she was empty, Anna turned to walk on. “Mom…if we ever see Carron again…he wants to turn us into that.”
“I know. One foot in front of the other, and don’t look! Don’t lose energy to anything you can’t control.”
“If we see Carron again…if we don't see him first — ”
“Walk!”
Webs we weave tighten to mesh
Mrs. Marjorie Bendham could knit, so Xavier assigned her to knit mittens and teach others how to do the same. “What about scarves and hats and such?”
Xavier patted her shoulder. “We’ll need warm hands where we’re going. When everyone has mittens, then you can work on socks. I’m told,” — at this he pointed at the sky — “it will be very cold where we’re going. Far North will be the only safe place. It’s going to be us and Big Foot! Or Big Feet, depending how many there are.”
“Perhaps they’ll appreciate my socks,” Mrs. Bendham said.
The old woman couldn’t remember when she had worked harder. Few things broke her routine: a few hours of sleep and the odd small meal that appeared irregularly and then more knitting broken up by singing in the cult’s choir. When she complained about her rumbling belly, Xavier gave her a bigger role among the sopranos to shut her up and make her even more busy.
“People are getting bored of the Om. Hard to imagine, but we have to intersperse some spiritual sort of music. I know you can sing, Mother Bendham. Can you help us out?”
Mother Bendham. Mrs. Bendham and Al had never had children so no one had ever called her “Mother.” She blamed Al and Al blamed her, but her husband had been too shy to go to the clinic to get tested. Now, so near to the end of her life, she had purpose and she was surrounded by young people of all ages. Despite her hunger, she enjoyed teaching the young ones to knit, even the left-handed ones who made the teaching harder.
A few days after the Spencers fled East, she was pleased to see Francis Carron laughing with a small group of men and women. He at last seemed at ease. He’d gone on a hunting trip for the group and brought down a deer. The experience seemed to loosen the man up. He looked thinner and healthier and, to her surprise, when he passed her in the chow line, Carron tipped his hat and said, “Mother Bendham,” with respect.
The group ate watered down soup, to make their supplies last. “How long before we get where we’re going?” Mrs. Bendham asked Xavier.
“The place we have to get to is up by the tree line.”
“What will we eat?” she asked.
“It will be difficult at first, but the Lord will provide. Nobody has any right to die in the woods if they’re ready to have the healthiest meals of their lives. Under rocks there are grubs. Trees have bark and sap and pine trees will provide us with tea. Some will complain, but if they want to live, they’ll adapt to a new, tougher way of living. We’ve had it too soft for too long and now we’ll all be tougher. You’re the oldest of the flock, but even you will be made new and strong in the land of the Lord. One day soon, we’ll live without disease and we’ll only die when the Lord is ready to receive us. Longer lives and no more suffering. It came to me in a dream. It’s a beautiful vision of the future.”
“Grubs,” she said.
“And worms packed with protein everywhere!” Xavier said.
“Ah. Breakfast of kings and queens. Mr. Xavier,” she said, loud enough for all to hear, “are you familiar with Matthew 7:15?”
He looked around into many hungry faces, their heads coming up from contemplating their thin soup.
"Truly and sincerely, Mr. X… ” she began.
Xavier looked her dead in the eye and her mocking tone died in her throat. The cult leader quoted Matthew with force, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles.” Without a hint of irony, Xavier added, “You’re right, Mother Bendham. We will certainly have to watch out for those.”
* * *
That same night, Francis Carron came to call. He found her asleep in the craft tent late at night. She’d been knitting and dozed off over her work. She’d run out of red and so one child’s mitten was red and the other was pink.
“Mother Bendham?” Carron roused her gently.
She startled awake. “Oh!”
“Sh.” Carron pointed to the corner of the tent. Two children lay side by side asleep. “Don’t wake them,” he whispered.
When adults wanted to be alone in their tents, they often sent their children to the craft t
ent to keep them occupied. The boy and the girl, about five and six, rolled together in their sleep, their arms around each other.
“Mother Bendham, I’ve come about an apology. You laughed at me on my first night here, as Xavier held me and welcomed me to the group. While the body of my man, Bently, lay just a few feet away, all torn up, you mocked me. That was uncharitable.”
She gaped at him for a moment, but nodded vigorously. She could feel danger about the man. She hadn’t seen it when he was with the others, but alone with him this close? Anger burned behind his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” the old woman said quickly.
“Thank you, Mother. I accept your apology and I can tell you mean it. I respect that. So often we run into people who will apologize but it doesn’t come from the heart. They’re reluctant to say they were wrong or they waffle even while they are apologizing. They say, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ instead of saying, ‘I’m sorry I did that.’”
But she was no fool. “What do you want from me, Carron?”
He knelt before her chair and bowed his head, his eyes lowered. “I want to leave. I have business with your friends. The Spencers have a bill to pay. They took my people away from me.”
“You can’t leave. You were told. The guards — ”
“Thank you for your concern but arrangements have been made. I don’t want any fuss. No one will know I’m gone until morning and, by then, it will be too late to chase me. Xavier's having a long chat with the guards right now, hearing their confessions.”
Marjorie Bendham smirked. “What do you — ”
With one hand, he covered her mouth.
"Sh. Don't be mad at me, you old bat. All I wanted was an apology. But, Xavier had an afternoon nap. God came to him in a dream. He says you're guilty of sedition. Thank you for that. X needed an executioner and plausible deniability." He smiled. "You've bought me my freedom, truly and sincerely."
Carron slipped one of her knitting needles up under her rib cage, through the tough muscle of the diaphragm and used his weight on the needle to pierce her heart. “Of course, I could have done you while you were asleep, but that's not what you deserve.”
The children did not stir. Blood spurted between them as Carron whispered in her ear. “I’m not sorry. I guess you aren’t, either. Not truly and sincerely.” He pulled back to watch the life drain from her face. Marjorie Bendham's eyes dulled to glass. “Bitch.”
When he stood, the child’s mittens in the old woman’s lap matched. They were both crimson.
Carron stood a moment more, watching the sleeping children to make sure they weren’t playing possum. Had they so much as twitched in their sleep, Carron would have used the knitting needle again.
We aren't so far apart, you and I
Dr. Ellen Harper found Daniel Merritt sleeping in his wheelchair by the algae-ridden reflecting pool outside the Manitoba Disease Research Centre. Merritt’s lone bodyguard, a soldier named Kennefic, sat a few yards away, smoking cigarettes and waving away mosquitoes.
Kennefic stood as soon as he saw Ellen coming. “Hi, Dr. Harper.”
“Tristan.” She gave a curt nod.
“Is it too soon to remind you that I’m just about the last man on Earth?”
“Yes.”
“When will be a good time to remind you again? In about an hour?”
“I’d give it a lot more time, were I you. Mountains will rise and fall. Oceans will evaporate. Apes will rule the planet first. Then get back to me.”
“Ouch, Doc.”
She kept going, eyes forward, not wanting to encourage the soldier with eye contact.
“You sure you want to wake him? He was up all night.”
“So was I, and he’ll want to hear this.”
She crouched so she was at eye level with the virologist. The left side of Merritt’s neck was still bandaged from the attack at the Brickyard refugee camp. Somehow, Merritt had escaped infection with Sutr-A. He’d been spared disease, but his left arm hung at his side, useless due to nerve damage. The CDC chief’s back was broken. As a virologist, he was still useful, but only if he didn’t take too much medication for the stabbing pain through his spine and the searing burn down the sciatic nerves of both legs.
She touched his arm gently. “Dr. Merritt?”
The big man startled and grimaced, but did not open his eyes. “What?”
“The last series is in. Bozo’s alive.”
“What?”
“Bozo. The Rhesus. He’s alive. No traces of Sutr-X. I’ve cracked it. We’ve got the basis for a vaccine.”
“We cracked it?”
Ellen swallowed her irritation. Merritt had descended upon her laboratory after his escape from the Brickyard attack. Irritable and in a fog half the time, Merritt’s contribution to her breakthrough had mostly been to tell her to work faster.
“We’ve got the bug on the run now,” she said. “This is the turning point. We stick the survivors and they won’t die in the next waves of Sutr.”
Merritt’s smile didn’t last long. “Congratulations, Doctor, but we’ve also got to climb the next link to Sutr-Z and Sutr-A. We’re going to have to figure a way to weaponize it. I don’t fancy an army trying to needle the infected one by one.”
Ellen stood. “Dan. I just turned water into wine and all you can tell me is ‘That’s white and I wanted red’?”
“But —”
“I’m one person. With you? One and a half on a good day. I’m sorry, but I don’t have enough resources. We need more techs and a team of microbiologists.”
Merritt shrugged slightly, a gesture which clearly pained him. “What would you have me do, Ellen?”
“Put out the call. Statistically, there have to be more medical personnel out there. Get them here. You’ve always treated this station as an outpost and me as an also-ran. Well, guess what? We’re the hub of the hope of civilization now. However we can get experienced people here, that’s priority one. That’s something you can do. I’m going to go grab a nap now. When I wake up, tell me you’ve got more people on the way to help me. Send up the goddamn flare.”
She spun and stalked away.
As Ellen slept, Dr. Merritt got Private Tristan Kennefic to send out the call across the world for anyone left alive who could help staff the lab and save the world from the next wave of the Sutr-X pandemic.
That message proved their undoing.
The narrative is the thing
The pink sand burned hot under Lijon’s bare feet, quickening her step. She didn’t mind the pace. For the first time in years, she moved without pain. That morning, she’d awoken in her room in the Belmont Hotel to find her Desmoid tumors were gone. Her legs were smooth as silk, without a sign of the disease. Lijon had started the day with a long, luxurious bath, lathering and shaving her legs twice without a nick.
To her right, the pink sand gave way to a calm ocean, the clear water yielded to blue farther out. Then the cloudless sky took over, melding with the water so well she had to squint to detect the horizon’s azure seam.
“Little Sister!” Shiva called. “Are they coming?”
Lijon shaded her eyes. “Their plane should land within the hour!”
Shiva, heavy with child in a red bikini, waved her closer. The woman formerly known as Dr. Ava Keres did not lumber as pregnant women do at this stage of pregnancy. Shiva moved with a lethal grace any dancer or jungle cat would envy.
As Lijon approached, she surveyed the scene. A large pot bubbled and boiled under a strong fire. Shiva looked relaxed, lying on a towel, her feet pushing through the sand, luxuriating in the sunlight. Beside her, two tall bottles of water and one bottle of champagne sat in a bucket, mutated ice cubes all soft edges and shrinking.
“Good morning, Dear Sister! I never would have thought of you lying around, enjoying a Bermudian beach!”
“Oh?”
Lijon shifted her weight back and forth, wishing she’d thought to wear flip-flops.
She was thankful her superior wore the mirrored sunglasses. Her bright white irises reminded her of the ice in a wolf's hungry eyes or the otherworldly glow some owl’s eyes possess. “Um…I guess I always thought you were most at home in a lab coat.”
“It’s a new future.”
“And a better world, Dear Sister.”
Shiva eyed her lieutenant a moment more. “Report.”
“The emissaries are in a small plane. There will be two of them.”
“Two of them plus the pilot or is one of them a pilot?”
Lijon’s jaw tightened. She didn’t know, but not knowing the answer to a question was dangerous. “Just the two.”
“You’re certain?”
“Y-yes.”
“Continue.”
“The polls are in. The island was lightly touched by the Sutr virus. The poorest Bermudians were hit hardest. The government shut the island down fairly early in the outbreak and the island’s so small, they actually managed quarantine and containment. I bet if we slipped down to the Dutch Antilles, we’d find several islands pristine and untouched by Sutr.”
“So, I’m the only one ‘infected’ here, hm?” Shiva laughed.
Lijon hands trembled. “We’re surrounded by humans, but the populace is…malleable. I spoke to a constable in Hamilton yesterday. He whined that perhaps twenty percent of the populace succumbed to the Sutr flu. He has no idea how easy he had it. Twenty percent is the lowest infection rate we know of, so far.”
“So, this is our vacation from the war. I like that the cars have no rust and the scenery is pleasant, but I don’t care about Bermuda, Lijon. Tell me what I’ve conquered.”
“The report from Nanjing came in late last night. Sutr-X mortality holding steady at approximately sixty-two percent on the mainland. It shot high in Hong Kong, though. They estimate the cull might be as high as eighty-three percent. Sutr-Z is cleaning up the rest. Hong Kong officially belongs to the zombies.”
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