Sometime toward dawn, Fern bent over Jaimie. The one who did all the talking stood behind her, holding a long knife in one hand and Anna’s backpack in the other.
Jaimie turned the memory over and over, examining every detail. It was not a lie. It felt soft and light and rare like a fiction, but it had happened.
Since the destruction of his home, all Jaimie’s dreams were so harsh and full of chaos. Misericordia called out to him, demanding he join the vampires. Shiva plotted to kill him. Carron was not far away and getting closer, sworn to kill his family in a twisted bid for revenge.
When he wasn’t bound by The Way of Things, choosing who would live and who was to die horribly, the dead followed him, moaning for meat.
Each night’s burdens and terrors would not be softened by Fern’s gift, but finally someone had given him something that was meant just for him. For a moment he was not a tool or a weapon or a messenger.
As he rode the crest between sleeping and waking. Fern gave him a single, warm kiss — an angel’s kiss — on his neck. She made him feel so normal, he loved her for it.
Were angels really dead things? No. Fern’s kiss was so soft and sweet, dead was the wrong word for angels. Fern was a kindred spirit. She would have to endure the future, but she would be spared the war.
Down on the road were the dead. Shiva and Misericordia, even Dr. Sinjin-Smythe, called those infected with Sutr-Z “zombies.”
But The Way of Things didn’t see them that way. The Way of Things called the infected the “Army of Light.”
That sounded wrong for a growing army of drooling ghouls with Sutr-Z raging through their blood. The blind woman from New York had died of radiation sickness on the road North. Jaimie felt terrible for her. She hadn’t even lived to be a soldier in the war.
Her fallen body had created more soldiers, however. When the rains came, water washed her bodily fluids into a stream. The Sutr-Z virus had lived just long enough to infect the drinking water of a band of marauders camped nearby. They were sick now, too. They joined the parade, mindless and hungry and marching to the final battle.
What word could be the right choice for beings so dangerous? That wasn’t thinking but was not yet a corpse?
“Vampires?” Theo said. “We used to call them politicians because they sucked us dry. And zombies were the mindless shoppers at the mall.”
“Not helping, Dad,” Jaimie whispered.
Sutr-A had made the vampires much stronger. At their core they were still humans. If not for their ravenous, murderous hunger, the vampires were, in physical ways, perfected. Jaimie's dictionary was burned, but there was no word big enough for the unfolding horrors. The words zombie and vampire would have to do.
He felt terrible for them. Somehow, in a way he did not understand, bad men had made the French girls feel less than human. He wished the marauders who had drunk the blind woman’s infection had been the same men who’d hurt the sisters.
But The Way of Things didn’t care about justice. Not for individuals. Not in a way the boy could understand.
“Life’s not fair, but it’s our job to make it that way,” his father said.
Jaimie listened to his mother curse softly as she repacked their bags. He heard Anna kick dirt over the last glowing embers, burying the fire’s ashes. He sensed his father had wandered off. Theo was out of sight but was never far away.
Jaimie didn’t want to get up or even move to stretch. He’d risen too early. Now that they’d delivered the message to Anna, Genevieve and Fern would head to safety. He’d almost followed the girls when they left.
However, The Way of Things would have Its way or Jaimie would never be allowed any rest. His father needed him and he would soon meet some of the European refugees in person.
With fewer people left in the world, it was easier to see how everyone needed each other. It was a strange paradox but, when the population was vast, more people thought they were alone.
Before the plague, the word individualist was usually preceded by the word rugged. After Sutr-X, the more accurate descriptor was usually the word dead.
Anna bent over her brother. “I got your message, Ears. I wish you’d told me yourself instead of hearing it from a couple of bossy thieves. I got a similar message from a baby warning me away. I’m not going to make it to Papa Spence’s farm.”
Anna leaned closer. “But Carron and those monsters from the Brickyard are out here. I don’t know about zombies and vampires, but I know this. I’ll stick with you as long as I can. I’ll defend you guys or die trying as long as I can because that’s what I’ve always done and that’s the way it is.”
Jaimie thought Anna might kiss him on the cheek. Instead she slapped her thighs and pushed herself to her feet. “Let’s get going. Date with destiny and all that crap.”
She sauntered away. Though she possessed no weapon, she walked as if she was a cowboy with six-guns strapped to her hips.
Losing his sister was too troubling a thought, so he closed his eyes and turned his mind back to Fern.
Jamie could still feel the shape of Fern’s lips on his neck. That felt like a kind of blessing and, sadly, a benediction. Jaimie worried the feeling would disappear when he opened his eyes.
The feeling didn’t fade. Jaimie carried that first kiss with him all the way toward the rising sun and long after the sun warmed their backs.
Jaimie was content knowing that Fern and Genevieve could now go North, safe from the horrors he strode toward.
The boy still couldn’t see the future, but he was sure his first kiss would be his last.
Were the devils hellish or heaven sent?
Ed slowed the truck and let the zombies come close to catching up.
Junior put out his hand as if offering to shake hands with a tall man with few teeth at the head of the column.
“C’mon, big fella. How about we be friends? Wanna give peace a chance?”
The tall man lunged at Junior’s outstretched fingers. Junior pulled his hand back just in time. The zombie tripped and fell, thereby tripping several zombies behind him. The Sutr-Z group was so thick, many fell like bowling pins as they were pushed from behind.
Junior laughed uproariously. “They aren’t too smart, are they?”
Ed glanced in his rearview mirror. “My dad told me once that it was okay if I wasn’t smart as long as I was kind.”
“Okay, so the message is, he knows you don’t need a sling for your big ol’ swinging’ brain dick. He knows you aren’t too bright.”
“That’s how I took it. That was the weekend I dented the fender on his new Prius.”
Another zombie, a barefoot, bald, black woman wearing only a hospital gown, ran forward with surprising energy and grabbed the tailgate. She was halfway into the bed of the pickup. Junior fell back and squeezed off more rounds until his pistol clicked, blowing the infected woman off the truck and into the crowd.
“A little faster, Ed!” Trying to appear cool, Junior dumped the brass jackets from the gun. They clattered and rang off the truck bed.
“I’m losing the thread here, wart! Your dad called you dumb but told you he’d love you if you were a sweet little boy when you dented his fender? Big deal. It was an accident.”
“Nope. I slammed it into the garage on purpose.”
“Wait. It wasn’t an accident? Really?”
“That’s what I told everyone. Even you, Junior!” Ed played with the gas and Junior stumbled around the truck bed, trying to maintain his balance while he reloaded.
“Cool. You’ve got more spine than I thought. But what’s your point?”
“Those zombies don’t have to be smart to mess you up.”
“Uh-huh.” Junior was almost reloaded when Ed jammed on the brakes and he flew forward, slamming the back of his head into the cab. The Super Redhawk clattered from his grasp.
Bleeding from the back of his head, Junior rose, furious. “You little shit! What are you doing?”
“I’m telling you, I don’t have to be smart to mess you up, either.”
Junior began to reach in the cab’s open back window and Ed floored the accelerator pedal. The engine roared as Junior grabbed for the edge of the window. Instead, his hand closed on air. He fell on his back and momentum carried him to the back of the truck so fast he struck the top of his head on the tailgate. Something in his neck crunched and Junior Tate howled in pain and rage.
The Super Redhawk, its cylinder still open, slid back, too, within a few inches of his hand. Junior fumbled for the weapon. Ed glanced back, grinning like a child on his first roller coaster ride. He shifted the pickup into reverse.
“No! No!” Junior screamed.
The rear bumper slammed into the advancing zombies. Junior managed to get off one shot. If he’d been as intelligent as he thought he was, Junior Tate would have shot himself in the brain. He was too angry for that. He tried for Ed’s head instead. The bullet went wide and put a hole in the safety glass at the back of the cab and through the windshield, crinkling and crumpling it.
Strong arms wrapped around Junior and lifted him out of the back of the truck. The Super Redhawk thunked and scraped as it fell out of his grasp into the truck bed, useless. Ed threw the vehicle out of reverse and pulled away.
Junior had once seen a scuba diver on television get grabbed around the wrist, his arm in the jaws of a moray eel. The terrified diver had pulled and pulled. The trick to escape was to reserve enough strength so when the monster eel opened its jaws just enough to get a better grip, the scuba diver had to time his efforts to pull away even harder.
That was a good theory, but there was no time for thinking. Panic at the possibility of becoming infected served Junior better. Pissing his pants and powered by fear, the young man pulled away from his attackers with savage thrusts. He’d played a lot of football and, though confused and scared, Junior Tate’s survival instinct and training wouldn’t allow him to be taken down so easily.
The Sutr-Z zombies were hungry, injured and debilitated ghouls. Junior had earned three touchdowns in the last football season before the Sutr-X plague shut down his high school forever. Junior pushed and kicked backward blindly.
He got free, stumbled and scrambled away, out of the zombies’ reach.
Junior Tate ran, chasing the truck down the road. He screamed one word, “Why?” But his mind was on his pistol in the back of the pickup.
Ed Bruce looked back and slowed the truck just enough to give Junior hope. A group of faster zombies broke from the horde and ran full tilt behind Junior. He glanced back and ran faster.
“You’re my best friend, man!” Junior yelled.
“That’s the sad part. I was always a good friend to you, Donny, but you’ve always treated me like a wart!”
Junior gasped, swinging his arms and willing his legs to pump faster. The pack of Sutr-Z runners began to fall back.
“But this isn’t about you and me,” Ed called back. “It’s about Helen!”
“Who?”
“Helen Stevens. The lady with one leg your dad shot!”
“What?”
“That was murder!” Ed yelled, that crazed roller coaster smile still plastered across his face. “Nobody stood up to you and your dad and now Don Tate Senior is king, Ol’ Elly’s playing queen and little Donny Tate Junior is a goddamn prince! Not that you care, but Helen Stevens helped me with my homework after school in elementary school! She earned a Purple Heart! She deserved better, Donny!”
The zombies were still coming, but they weren’t up to the chase. One by one, the Sutr-Z infected dropped away and fell into a brisk walk, starving for meat, but too weak to catch up with Junior.
With the last of his breath, an anguished Junior called back through tears. “Don’t I deserve better…than to be eaten alive…or turned into…one of those…things?”
“You’re a wart, Donny! You hear me? You…are a useless, old-lady-killin’ wart!” Ed gave the pickup some gas and drove away, laughing, but scared at what he'd done, too.
Junior did not get what he deserved. He was not brought down by the Sutr-Z infected humans. It was zombie dogs that ran him down and tore the boy apart. He was eaten alive.
It didn’t take very long as measured by a clock. If measured subjectively, by the pain of his screaming nerve endings and mind-shattering terror, Don Tate Junior’s death throes went on for eons.
Season 3, Episode 3
Occubo refers to resting, particularly in the grave. Vigilax is a night watch. But all names signify something.
Cooper, Abbott, Brewer, Baker, Fowler, Fletcher, Cook, Wright, Chapman…our names reach forward to us from a simple past when we were defined by what we did with our hands. The privileged rich — the Windsors and the Rockefellers — arrive without the remnants of a trade in their name. The descendants of warlords and robber barons are named after the places they owned. Our legacies are stamped on us, a heavy, indelible tattoo.
*
You’re angry because the universe is made of contradictions: Newtonian physics versus quantum theory, what ought and what is, a loving god who doesn’t care about you. Learn to tolerate nuance. You won’t be any closer to what’s right, but you’ll be happier.
*
We divide ourselves into teams. Like what I like or I’ll kill you with the jawbone of an ass. That’s stupid tribalism. Its proponents never have to look farther than their own chins to find their weapon of choice.
~ Notes from The Last Cafe
Meanings and Might hove and wove
While Jaimie slept under a leaky tarpaulin amid towering pines, he dreamt.
He saw his father standing inside the front door of Douglas Oliver’s house. Theo glanced back at him and bestowed a brave smile.
Then he saw Shiva talking about the man who discovered DNA’s double helix and how LSD opened the doors of perception. Jaimie saw his father again and the images flashed by, too quickly to be fully grasped: Theo Spencer dying on the couch; Theo surviving the Sutr-X virus; Theo talking about his childhood friend’s last gasp under a tree in a field on a starry night; Theo opening the doors of perception at the Gateway to the Spirit World under an unforgiving Milky Way.
Something was very wrong. Jaimie smelled smoke. His first thought was Francis Carron had found them and he would burn his family to death in a closing noose of gasoline-soaked trees. But the smoke was sulphurous.
“Jaimie? Jaimie, wake up, please. We need to talk.” The voice was seventy percent British accent, thirty percent gravel.
Before he opened his eyes, the boy knew who was waiting for him. Jaimie was confused. He had not chosen to go to Misericordia. Instead, the chief of the Alpha tribe had found him in the Dreamscape.
Jaimie was no longer shivering in his sleep in a Canadian pine forest. Instead, the air was hot as a fever and sweat prickled across his forehead and scalp. When Jaimie opened his eyes, they were mirrors. The boy was not in the calming birch forest he knew as the Nexus.
Misericordia sat a dozen paces away on a gleaming chunk of obsidian, his eyes burning bright white. He wore a black tuxedo. His shirt and tie and shoes were all black, too, shining like wet shark skin. The vampire held two long, thick chains, each attached to a spiked collar that encircled the neck of a Komodo dragon. The beasts hissed and strained at their steel leashes. The dragons eyed Jaimie hungrily.
“Hello,” Jaimie said. “This is unexpected.”
“I’m so glad to finally meet my emancipator again. Why didn’t you come to me sooner? I’ve been calling out to you, you know, every night. I owe you so much and I always reward my allies. I love to give people what they deserve.”
When Misericordia smiled, his canines looked longer than on their first meeting. Jaimie suspected his teeth were like that outside the Dreamscape, too, but then, anything could happen here, even death.
As Jaimie stood, he found he’d been sleeping in a patch of pebbled volcanic glass. As the small stones fell away, it sounded like a rain stick. The fal
l of black stones left the boy standing in blue flannel pajamas. He looked down at himself in surprise. The pajamas were bigger, but otherwise identical to night clothes that had been a Christmas gift from his mother’s friend, Brandy. Anna had told him his pajamas were fascist and racist because of the pictures of cowboys and Indians. Anna’s words had been sharp in Jaimie’s ears, but the pjs were so very soft.
The boy looked at his feet. “I’m wearing my father’s slippers.”
Misericordia watched him, curious. “I suppose, in unfamiliar environs, the mind reaches for comfort. How is your family?”
“Running. Francis Carron isn’t far behind us. I check in on him from time to time. He’s close by and very…determined.”
“I can help you with that problem. Or help you help yourself. I took down the Brickyard. I can make you so you have nothing to fear from Mr. Carron. Or any man.”
“I don’t fear him. When the time comes, he will fear me.”
“But you say you don’t know the future.”
“I know me.”
Misericordia smiled and nodded. “A good answer in keeping with my new life motto: Nobody’s bitch.”
“That’s a bad word Anna uses sometimes.”
“Jaimie, don’t be a bitch.”
“Okay.”
Here and there, the ground itself bubbled anew and issued fresh plumes of foul smoke. The scene was washed out, black and white and bleak as a moonscape.
“How did you find me?” Jaimie asked.
“Things are changing again. I’m evolving. Oh, I can’t move through dreams with the same ease that you possess. You probably have the only skill a human can have that I still envy.”
“Thank you.”
“You do feel the changes coming, don’t you? There are a lot fewer people left in the world — ”
“As if there is less need to share power with so many dolts.”
Misericordia looked startled. “I think I was about to say exactly that.”
“I know. It seems like we’re pulled together, doesn’t it? Not so much interference from radio waves and noise and chatter…whatever their distance apart might be, there seems less space among the survivors. Civilization, the way it was, put an impermeable membrane between us. Now that the noise of the living has died down, the membrane is more permeable. We’re cells in a larger organism and we’re finally beginning to communicate better.”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 72