We do what we're bid and act the fool
When Rahab walked up the beach, he found Shiva sitting beside a dead fire and a nearly dead human woman, spread-eagle in the hot, pink sand.
“This is Lijon. Say hello, Lijon.”
Lijon moaned.
“You’ll have to excuse her, Rahab. Her jaw doesn’t work very well now. Lijon had lots of problems. Her problems are almost behind her now.
“I’m sure the boy told her to kill me but Lijon didn’t have the spine to do it while she still could. I speak metaphorically, of course, but my gift to you is to make sure she doesn’t have a spine in the purest sense.”
Rahab looked down at the helpless woman. He preferred that his prey still be fighting when it went down. This execution was anything but sporting.
“Lijon used to have tumors in her legs,” Shiva said. “Those things disgusted me. That’s what saved her from my wrath this long. Her disfigurements made her so…unappetizing.”
Lijon moaned again.
“I’m suddenly reminded of a silly joke I heard in school when I was very young. Two demons meet over a sleeping human and one whispers to the other, ‘Do you want a good belly laugh?’”
Shiva reached out and held Lijon down by the neck. “And the other demon looks down at the sleeping human between them and says, ‘Instead of a belly laugh, let’s just split a gut.’”
It was just a human, but even Rahab looked away as Shiva slowly pulled Lijon’s abdomen apart. Then the hunger for blood overcame him. Rahab joined Shiva in the feast.
Blood covered Shiva’s face when she sat back to luxuriate in the sand. “I was a scientist. I can’t tell you how many rats I’ve vivisected. It was always fascinating to me. Vivisection is so much more interesting than autopsies. Vivisection…eating it while its gears and bellows are still working…how did we ever enjoy eating dead things? Lijon tasted better than any steak and Yorkshire pudding I’ve ever had.”
“That was good, my queen. Thank you.”
“Do you think I’m silly and vain, Rahab?”
She watched Fear’s yellow tentacles swarm through the aura over his heart and crawl up his throat. “No, my queen.”
Her gaze went to Rahab’s blood-smeared body. “I’m ready for dessert. Are you?”
At first, he thought she was going to kill him. With lightning speed, she reached behind his neck and threw him onto his back beside her. Shiva ripped his swim trunks from his body in one yank and pulled Rahab to her.
“Oh,” he said.
Shiva smiled. “You’re going to like serving under a queen.”
“You’re a goddess.”
“You’re right. And like any goddess, I’m jealous of all other gods. So you’re mine, right?”
“Right.”
“Right, what?”
“Right, my queen!”
“Then we’re going to get along fine…assuming you pass the audition, of course.”
Against unseen forces, under pressure
The traffic jam went on for days and so the Spencers walked. They hoped to cover twenty-five miles a day, but between detours around obstacles, the weight of the things they carried, and exhaustion, they were lucky if they put fifteen miles behind them.
Whoever had cleared the highway for so many miles, with a tank or a line of tanks — had plowed farther North into the woods. The rain was a curtain. Anna wanted to try to go back and follow the tanks, but her mother just shook her head when she consulted her map. “We’ve already gone too far North. We’ve got to make our way East and South. Maine is that way.”
The artery was thoroughly clogged. In their rush to get somewhere away from the cities, people had panicked. Each group, those driving East and those headed West, had been trying to get to safety and instead they had often found their ends in head-on collisions on narrow ribbons of highway.
“Where did they think they could run that the virus couldn’t go?” Anna asked. “Did they think they could outrun the wind?”
The crush of cars and trucks ahead was so tight in places the Spencers had to abandon the asphalt and climb through long, yellow grasses beyond the ditches. Sticky, sharp burrs prickled and clung to their pants. The previous night’s rain had softened the ground. They struggled under the weight of their packs, losing purchase, losing ground and burning energy with each step.
Once they reached the edge of the woods, the ground was packed harder with the tread of many feet before them. “This might have been a deer trail before…but it's for us now,” Anna said.
“Bipeds!” Jaimie called out from behind her.
“Who pulled that string in your back, Ears?” she called back.
Theo looked around, surveying the destruction on the highway and wary of the tree line to their right. “It’s just us, son. If there are others around, they’re hiding. Camping deep in the woods, clutching guns and trying to stay away from each other. Don’t worry.”
They walked beside the river of wrecks and abandoned cars. Anna was glad of the distance from the road, though when the wind shifted, another sickening waft of rotten stench blew over them. Each ill wind freshened Anna’s nausea and made her skin itch.
They had seen many bodies, but now the corpses were more decayed. This carnage had struck in earlier plague days. The work of the birds and insects made the scene so very much worse.
* * *
Whenever they walked by a clutch of carrion-feeders, Jack and Anna swept by, heads straight, registering the movement only in their peripheral vision. The rot and desiccation was too great to explore cars for supplies.
Jack was somewhat relieved that many other hikers had come before them and found what salvage might be hidden in a trunk or a back seat. The trunks were popped open and the cars were empty, except for the dead. Perhaps the corpse rot hadn’t been so bad then. Or maybe the people in the cars were still alive when they were robbed.
There had been violence along the highway. Here and there, a corpse lay in between cars with a tire iron or a baseball bat close by. Most of the bodies they saw in the open had either perished from the plague or were murdered. Defensive wounds on fingers, hands and arms could still be seen among the dead and their tattered clothes.
How Jack hated what the world had become, doubly so because the collapse had struck so fast. Except for her family, all Jack had now was hate.
Each night, the little family slept deeply, but Jack often startled awake in darkness as deep as a well. She reached out. Jaimie was closest, inches away. Her hand found his shoulder and she slid her hand to Jaimie’s wrist. Under the tips of her trembling fingers she felt her son’s slow, steady pulse and waited until her pulse and breathing slowed to match his calm pace.
The rain had finally stopped. It had been miserable to walk through. They hadn’t thought to pack umbrellas so they had to rely on their jackets. When that failed, they rigged the tarp so all three walked underneath it.
Being dry was preferable, of course, but Jack liked how a gentle rain scrubbed the air clean. Rain brought water they wouldn’t have to carry. Gentleness told her the world was still on its axis, there would be a tomorrow, and a future they could walk toward.
Jack didn’t know how long she lay awake in the dark in those anxious in-between times. Her thoughts were redundant, spinning round, a tiny wheel of obsession and fear.
It’s not the end of the world, you idiot, Jack thought.
They had seen people along the way. There were survivors, but not enough to keep the old world’s gears greased and turning. The loss grieved Jack, not just for her own loss but for what her children could no longer possess.
Apocalypse meant the death of billions, but such sweeping tragedy brings about a thousand tiny ends that go unnoticed amid the first swipe of death and fear. It meant the end of movie magic and lazy Sunday mornings in bed and cappuccino with almond biscotti. It was the end of the world as she loved it.
Jack gulped in cool air. She sought
out Jaimie’s wrist again. She resisted the urge to grip him hard. Instead, she felt for his pulse and did not move again until her probing fingers were numb on his skin. These panic attacks wiped her mind empty — a luxury only modern people in pharmaceutical times could afford. She had no drugs to calm her so she had to make do with slowing her breathing. For a time — she couldn’t guess how long — she prayed. It seemed no one was answering, so she went back to keeping her breath slow and steady, matching Jaimie’s breath as best she could.
Think of happy things, but unpleasant, sick-making images from recent weeks rose unbidden.
Jack pictured the grandchildren she hoped Anna might give her in ten years or so. Jack would help. They would all live together and work together to keep on living. In the old world, technology had extended childhood for many all the way into middle age. There would be no more Peter Pans and delayed maturity. Her grandchildren would have very short childhoods. They’d live as thousands of generations had lived, back when everyone was a camper. What would life be like for children who would be expected to gather firewood as soon as they were old enough to walk? Would they have children as soon as they were biologically able, kids having kids?
Dr. Julian Sutr had identified the virus and named his evil child Sutr X (for his name and its shape under the microscope).
Men had always planted flags in undiscovered countries. When there were no more countries to steal from the natives, a planet full of unclaimed nature boiled away, waiting to be found and classified, named and proclaimed. They’d been told early in the crisis that Dr. Sutr had been killed by his namesake. He’d discovered and claimed it, but had failed to conquer it with his medicine.
Jack had seen the virus pictures many times, always outlined and stained in cerulean blue. Such pictures struck her as a symbol of nature’s indifference to humankind’s machinations. To a virus, a person is not a musician or an artist or a cost accountant. A person is a vast eco-system, a fallow field, a vulnerable body to be plundered. We are their incubators, their food source, their world to be discovered, claimed and conquered.
When the bug’s toll was small, pundits dismissed the new disease as hype, and who could blame them? All they reported was hype. The news was almost all about unknowns, lies and crystal ball predictions: what could happen with the stock market next week or next year? Experts warned of droughts and super storms and the dangers of planetary climate change, but weathermen were still wrong about the five-day forecast. Would some missing girl ever be found? The government planned to do something about this or that, but not now. Never now.
Later, news readers spoke in alarmed tones about another coming plague. They said it began in India so people stopped eating at Indian restaurants and boycotted Indian coffee beans, as if that helped. Then Sutr killed a few hundred cows. Within a few short news cycles, the media backlash hit.
Impatient for results, the commentators had opted for the pendulum swing of media coverage: sober second thought. It wasn’t all that dangerous, they said. We take more chances driving to work in the morning, they said. We’ve heard it all before: Swine Flu, SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu again, and now this? Bat flu? Cow Flu? Sutr-X? As if not dying today meant no one would ever die.
Bored with the same warnings repeated many times, the experts were now called The Nerd Squad and alarmists. This or that professor muttered about The Black Plague, Spanish Flu and AIDS for years, the news readers said. “I refuse to be scared of a cow,” one dead commentator said, as dumb as he was certain. He chewed a pink steak for the cameras. Between swallows, he chortled as the studio crew guffawed, cheering his suicide.
As Sutr-X mutated, it grew another knob and filament. More doctors peered at it through glass. By then, the microscopic spider was peering back up at them and getting hungry for blood. Even then, there were holdouts who insisted on eating black-market steaks and hamburgers. At least, until they started coughing.
One day, Jack supposed she would tell her grandchild how the little spider learned to fly through the air. “The Plague,” big T, capital P. Eventually, whoever was left would just call the disaster, The End.
“Before The End,” Jack would say, “Gramma took care of the kids and Grampa was a librarian. He picked which new books to put on the shelves.”
Jack could picture that beautiful, golden child with uncut hair and dirt smeared across full Tweety Bird cheeks. That child would look up with Anna’s blue eyes, eyes like Jack’s own. The child would say, “What’s a ‘news reader?’” And “Are there any new books anymore?”
“It doesn’t matter much,” Jack would say. “There aren’t enough of us around to remember how to make old things work and we’re spread too far apart to organize the world.”
Beside her in the darkness, Jaimie twitched and startled in his sleep. To Jack, he was a strange boy on the autistic spectrum. He could carry heavy things, but that was all his mother really knew.
But in sleep, Jaimie was already at war, a messenger for The Way of Things, a general in the coming war. The vampires would come for him. While his mother worried about the future, Jaimie was busy raising an army to fight for it.
A town in Vermont falls to ghouls
The infected marched, never sparing a backward glance at the smoke rising from the ruins of New York. From above, they looked like insects boiling out of a destroyed nest. First, they moved in tenuous lines, then stronger threads. Farther North, their numbers formed ragged columns.
The worst were those with flash burns. Many of the zombies, bent from their injuries, limped along. The searing heat of the blast burnt the clothes off many. One blast victim, her mouth a gaping, gasping black hole, had been wearing a plastic coat that melted around her like a ruined chrysalis. Another had worn a plaid shirt. The shirt was burnt away, but the criss-cross pattern remained, burned into his back, more cruel than a flaming whip. For some, far from the nuclear blast but caught outside at the moment of detonation, their blackened flesh hung in sheets that exposed the red muscle and white tendons, ligaments and melted bubbles of fat. Sometimes the strips of burnt flesh hung so long and low, their own ribbons tripped them as they shambled forward.
If the Sutr-Z infected could feel pain like the humans they’d once been, they would have perished in mercifully quick agony. Instead, they moved forward, aware of the pain but driven by hunger’s mission.
The farther North they walked, the weakest were harassed by dogs. Feral packs took down one, then two and then three.
Jaimie Spencer watched, aghast, as the dogs drove the weakest from the herd to feed on the flailing afflicted. Sometimes the zombies turned and fed on their attackers.
And Jaimie thought of Steve. Douglas Oliver’s beloved German Shepherd had taken the old man down by the throat. Sharp teeth in deep, the big dog had shaken his head, ripping and tearing deeper. Jaimie had watched from behind a locked screen door as Steve opened a pumping artery.
It felt just and righteous then. The boy didn’t feel that way now. His disgust was greater than his curiosity. He asked The Way of Things if he could look away. “Take this cup away, please!”
“As you wish. Would you rather speak with Misericordia? He calls out to you in his sleep. He desperately wants to talk to you. He’s trying to find a way to break through so he can bring you into his tribe.”
“Does he suspect what’s coming?”
“He’s intelligent, so he knows you’re dangerous to him. He’s prideful, so he’s sure it won’t matter. He has reason to be confident.”
“I’m not ready to talk to Misericordia yet. Show me someone else.”
“You must speak with Shiva again if you have any hope of winning.”
“I know, but please, give me an easy choice first. Let me talk to the wizard.”
“Very well. You make your world from your choices.”
“I know,” Jaimie said. “Don’t be a nag.”
“We are trying to help,” The Way of Things replied.
“You can se
e the future and know everything. As Dad would say, ‘Can you cut me some slack?’”
“That’s the one thing We can never do. You have to walk the path to find the meaning.”
“Funny. That’s what the trees in The Nexus asked for. Meaning. My dictionaries are full of meanings, but I think what they really want is sense. They want everything to make sense.”
“It will in the end.”
Jaimie turned away from the ugly scene below him to confer with the man with the long beard. He looked like the magician from the movie about magic hobbit jewelry.
Had Jaimie stayed, he would have witnessed the Sutr-Z virus turn its first canine victim into a zombie dog, as immune to pain as any of the infected humans and twice as dangerous as any weapon of vengeance named Steve.
They didn't have it coming
Shiva lay naked in the pink sand of a Bermudian beach under a blanket of bright constellations.
As she gazed at the night sky with shining white irises, Libra, The Scales, shone back, more clearly than she had ever seen the stars. Her visions and plans had come true and the completion of her mission was close at hand.
Lijon’s savaged corpse lay to her left, and her new lover, Rahab, slept on her right. Eventually, Shiva, too, fell into sleep.
She awoke in twilight on a bed of cool moss in a birch forest.
Blinking, she stood slowly and found she wore a long, white gown. The baby kicked, as if she were waking up, too. Shiva looked around. “Hello? I assume you want to talk, so talk.”
Jaimie, who had been floating in the air high above her, slowly descended to the forest floor. “Shiva.”
She looked him up and down. “You seem older.”
“Not by much. A little wiser, perhaps.”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 64