The monk stared at the ocean a while and Sinjin-Smythe was sure he wouldn’t speak. When he did, the doctor regretted asking.
“My father hit me, most days, for the first sixteen years and four months of my life. He was an angry drunk who smoked in bed. When our house burned down, I was left alone. The Jesuits found a place for me.”
“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry. So you became a monk for the education and dedicated yourself to your faith?”
“No, Craig. Don’t be sorry. My father was supposed to die from smoke inhalation. I hadn’t planned on losing the whole house.”
“Wh-what?”
“The old bastard woke up, burning alive. How was I supposed to know he’d run through the house and spread the fire? Caught the curtains. I’d made the fire look like an accident, but I should have barricaded his bedroom door.”
Sinjin-Smythe didn’t do so consciously, but he stepped back from Brother Bob. “So…you went to the church for forgiveness?”
“I’d have to repent to qualify for forgiveness, Craig, so no. I’d do it again. I’m not saying it was right. I should have run away, but I knew I couldn’t do that successfully without money. I thought a dead father and insurance money was my ticket to the good life.” The monk stared back steadily. “I was a kid. I made the sort of mistake I couldn’t take back. If I save the world from crazy, white-eyed bloodsuckers, that evens things up when I meet my judgment.”
“You believe you’ll go to heaven?”
Brother Bob winked. “I think so. I got the inside line on a sure bet. All these years of service, but it’s the killing I’ll do which will redeem me. They say we can’t earn grace, but a bunch of dead vampires sure should do the trick.”
The monk laughed. “Don’t look so appalled, Craig! I really did like the church. In the doctrine, we’re all sinners. Those low expectations lower the bar for everyone. That’s soothing to a man like me. I may be an arsonist and a murderer, but all sins, big and small, are basically equal. God made us, but He doesn’t expect much of us in the final analysis. He made a bunch of monkeys with opposable thumbs and He knows it. Now? If I die on this mission? Clean slate for this monkey.”
“Thank you, Brother Bob. I’m suddenly feeling much better about myself.”
“Nuance, doctor,” the monk said. “You do not have it. Your face betrays you.”
“Sorry, I thought I was on the side of the good guys.”
“Desi’s a good man. You could be. I’m really not, but if I do the right thing, it’s still the right thing.”
“I’m glad your faith gives you such comfort.”
“Grow up, Craig. I did. The second I lit that match when I was sixteen. Lots of things don’t look right from the outside. I’m sure you tortured animals for research, all so calm and professional and dispassionate, like it was nothing. Looked at differently, you’ve got a touch of the psychopath in you, too. We all do.”
“If dragging the rest of the human race down to your level makes you feel better — ” “Spare me the condescension. I lit the match. I’d do it again. You’re lucky I’m here, Craig! If I hadn’t burned my father to death, I wouldn’t be here now, on the good guy’s side, would I?”
“You scare me a little,” Sinjin-Smythe said. “Anybody who says everything bad is part of God’s plan? That scares me.”
“Holy warriors should be scary. We aren’t much good to anyone if we’re not. God needs gladiators, Craig.”
“Gladiators,” the doctor replied, “weren’t soldiers. They were for entertainment.”
“Even so.”
Season 3, Episode 4
Some people welcome the apocalypse. They long for a world without rules so they can impose their own order on chaos. But once the rules go away, we discover who we are. Many will be disappointed.
*
Terrible things happen and we call them learning experiences. Monstrous events change our lives and we look back, rationalizing our actions and reactions. Monsters make monsters. But we believe we are in the right, always.
*
It is easy to hurt people. It’s difficult to help people. Who are the bigger heroes? The caregivers. The angels of our higher natures. The ones holding the oxygen tanks, blankets and plowshares.
*
If peace isn’t the answer, the wrong question is being asked.
~ Notes from The Last Cafe
We're doing the best we can, but debts still accrue
Up a steep embankment near the mouth of the tunnel, the Spencers made their shelter in a circle of red maples by the river. Mitch had a light pup tent which Lane helped erect. Without being told, the child started looking for twigs to build a fire. She never strayed far.
“You’ve trained her well,” Jack said.
“She’s been through a lot,” Mitch said. “She knows the rules. If she’s where she can’t see me and me, her, she’s not where she’s supposed to be.”
The girl made a tiny pyramid of twigs on the ground. Her father pulled a plastic bag out his pack.
Jack glanced at it. “Is that marijuana?”
“Heh. No. I wish.”
On closer inspection, it was a downy moss. Mitch caught her perplexed look. “Hey, Lane, tell the people what this is!” He held the bag up to his chin, as if lengthening his heavy beard farther.
The girl burst into giggles and pulled a hunk of the moss from its bag. She held it up to her own chin. “Old Man’s Beard!”
“Not so much, sweetie,” Mitch said as he took more than half back. “Gotta make everything last.”
“Sparkler! Do the sparkler!” Lane said.
Mitch dug into a pants pocket by his knee and produced a flint. Lane took two steps back and watched as her father struck the flint to produce a small shower of sparks.
Soon the moss smoked a little. Lane blew on it and the tiny flame went out.
“It’s dry, sweetie. Let the moss do the work.”
Mitch struck the flint again and this time, when it smoked, the girl blew a softer stream of air, nurturing the coming fire. A small flame rose and Mitch placed it carefully under the tent of twigs.
Jaimie and Anna brought some deadfall and Mitch bent and twisted the smaller branches until they were of suitable lengths to feed the flames.
As they sat around the small fire, each party shared what they had. The Spencers offered teriyaki jerky and lentils. Mitch provided a rabbit, which he skinned and gutted by the fire with quick, sure hands.
“How’d you get the rabbit?” Anna asked.
“Slingshot. It’s what bolts and ball bearings are good for now.”
“Hunting as you go,” Anna observed. “We should have done that instead of trying to carry everything.”
“That’s what I should have stocked up on,” Theo said. “A shotgun, slingshots for the kids and a rod and reel. We had fishing equipment. It burned in the closet by the front door.”
Mitch had been a long-haul trucker from Salt Lake. He’d been headed for California with a load of tires when authorities barricaded the roads. He stayed in a motel in North Dakota for a week before he couldn’t stand it anymore and headed for home. He stuck to back roads and once ran a roadblock.
“A State Trooper threw a few shots but they weren’t going to chase after anybody once you got past them. They had enough problems to worry about.”
Jack told of their encounter with the military roadblock they’d narrowly survived. She’d been afraid then, but it seemed like that had happened a long time ago. Now, with time, she thought the soldiers had been almost as afraid as she.
After he put his daughter to bed in the pup tent, Mitch returned to the fire to tell the rest of his story. “East to West is a tangle. Maybe it was a plan or maybe it just happened organically as the cities shut down. I think the government’s idea was to block off the urban areas enough to stop the contagion. Like a failing computer’s hard drive: bad sectors and good sectors. You can save something if the whole thing isn’t
fried.”
“Where did you cross into Canada?” Jack asked.
“I walked across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie a month ago,” Mitch said. “It was eerie. Nobody was there. No customs officers to stop anybody, of course. Abandoned machine gun nests. I blindfolded Lane so she wouldn’t see.” He leaned forward to whisper, “Massacre.”
“They shot hundreds of refugees. A bunch of them were armed, but what are machine guns against mortars and cannons? I carried Lane on my back. Crawled over mounds of bodies. I threw up until I had no more to give and couldn’t eat for another day after.”
Mitch went quiet for a time. His eyes were wet. “Made me think…made me think we deserve Sutr. If we can’t pull together, maybe it is time we started again and give the dolphins or the monkeys a shot at building a civilization. Maybe we have to burn everything down to clear the decks for something different. The Sutr flu is a test of our humanity. Life is too cheap. As a species, I’d give us an F, and that’s grading easy.”
Jack reached out, touching his arm gently. “I don’t know what to say to you. I’m just…I’m sorry. But I think with so many dead, life isn’t cheap. Whoever is left alive has more value. Scarcity makes things precious.”
Mitch’s chin touched his chest. “That’s not the lesson of the Peace Bridge. And what was it all for? At some point, maybe even the shooters got sick of themselves. By the time we went through, everybody had just gone home, either to deal with the way things are now or to die. The dead belong to cats and dogs and birds and rats and insects now. The length of the Peace Bridge was the longest walk.”
“And given its name, the most ironic one. We saw the same thing,” Anna said. “Different bridge. Same story. Where’s Lane’s Mom?”
Jack shot her daughter a warning look but Mitch said he didn’t mind saying. “My wife. Jill. She got sick. It’s a good thing I got home when I did but I wasn’t quite quick enough. I don’t know how long my wife was dead. Not long, I think. I should have tried to make the break for home earlier, at least to say goodbye. I just thought if everybody stayed put, it would all blow over faster. That’s all the radio said. ‘Stay home or stay put.’ Jill was in the upstairs bedroom when I found her. She must have been thinking I’d get home any minute.”
The man stroked his beard and looked away, but the tiny fire threw enough light to make his tears glisten. “When I walked into our bedroom, her head was turned toward the door and her eyes were open. She stared at me, as if to say, ‘What kept you? I’ve been waiting.” Mitch began a moan, straightened and cleared his throat.
“I looked for Lane and called and called for her. I thought my daughter was dead and gone, too, but she was hiding. I found her in the front hall closet surrounded by chip bags left over from last Halloween. Jill had opened a bunch of water bottles for her, too. She must have seen her own death coming. I almost left without my daughter, but I stopped to grab a coat on the way out. If I hadn’t stopped for that coat…”
“Your wife knew you’d come,” Anna said. “She planned ahead. She thought of the water bottles. She knew you’d find Lane.”
“Ianius clausis,” Jaimie said.
The group looked to the boy, perplexed.
Only Theo smiled. “That means, ‘behind closed doors.’”
Jaimie frowned, studied his father for a moment. They aren’t listening. Why can’t they hear what you hear? Jaimie crossed his eyes so he couldn’t see Theo anymore.
Gunshots.
A woman’s screams echoed from the tunnel mouth below. Eloquent in her rage, the woman’s anger lasted longer than her fear. It was clear she was the one pulling the trigger.
Mitch kicked dirt on the fire and the Spencers retreated under their tarp, watchful lest the shooter climb the embankment. Whoever had caused the woman with the gun such terrors was no match for her. She kept shooting. Shouts of pain echoed up from the tunnel. The shooter was in charge and whoever had sought to dominate her had failed.
Most of what the woman yelled were long vowel sounds. Then she called to her attackers, “You got more holes in you tonight than you started with this morning! If y’all live, next time you pee, you’ll piss like a lawn sprinkler! Come again and I’ll serve up some more of that sweet Smith & Wesson!”
Sic transit gloria mundi, Theo Spencer thought.
Jack and Anna looked at Jaimie in wonder and surprise as he translated the full sentence, “So passes away the glory of the world.”
The woman wandered deeper into the tunnel and away, but the echoes of her triumphant shouts followed the travelers into their dreams that night.
While everyone else eventually fell into fitful sleep, Anna watched her brother in the dim light. His lips moved in his sleep but no sound came. She strained to hear but could not catch one word.
She tried to see him as the French girls had described him. She tried to picture the brother she’d known as an angel with wings of fire but could not hold the image. Had he always had this in him, deep underneath all the autistic weirdness? What if all his life, while she’d underestimated him, he’d been a ball of potential energy whose capabilities could only be unleashed in this situation? Perhaps all these years Jaimie’s potential lay dormant. Was he like a savant who would be recognized as a virtuoso at a keyboard, if only he’d been born to a family who could afford a piano?
Anna stared at her brother, wondering how much he knew and what secrets he would reveal if he finally began to speak cogently. She clenched her jaw until the muscles ached, her teeth hurt and tears slid from the corners of her eyes.
If he were normal, Anna would have loved to share the heavy weight of her secrets with her brother. If the French girls spoke the truth, he already knew.
Sometimes, when she was little and angry with him, Anna told Jaimie he was ugly and that she hated him. His condition ensured that, unlike all her friends’ little brothers, he’d never tattle.
She hoped he understood how much she really loved him. She used to think being an only child would have been perfect. Now, with the losses the Spencers had suffered, to Anna, family was everything.
Working for Big Daddy and humanity, too
They all held hands, sometimes so tightly it hurt. Mitch led the way into the tunnel, the sharp white glow of his LED headlamp swept and searched the narrow path of chrome, crumpled fenders and bashed grills. The light revealed far too much beyond the curtain of darkness.
They had seen horror, but that was outside. Moving past twisted and tangled corpses in the light of day, they could look away and still find their way. In the tunnel's darkness, they shuffled forward, afraid of what they might step on, or in.
The tunnel was a tomb with many dead. Most had died in the early days of the plague. Perhaps some died of the disease here. Many others had died by violence: A crashing car; bullets; many had been consumed by flame. The LEDs’ bright, white shine showed black evidence of charred corpses.
And there was the smell. They walked deep underneath the earth, but there was no warm, safe feeling here among the jammed wrecks. Jaimie identified oil, gasoline, the putrescence of rotten meat and a sickly-sweet subtext of withered apples. Or perhaps that last was his imagination. The burned people reminded him of wizened apple dolls, puckered and old and wrinkled. Mitch never let his beam linger on any ugly scene, but each strobed flash of the field ahead was enough to burn horrors into steadfast memories.
They shuffled on, careful of swords of metal that reached for them from what were once vehicles. It wasn’t a word, but Jaimie felt that “onceness” captured the feeling he got from the tunnel’s dead. The cars were once new and proud purchases. The people were once people. Now they were burned husks, mere tokens of something they had imagined in some way permanent.
The boy remembered a story he had listened to long ago, with his father, at the family computer back in Kansas City. A woman talked about how the government had gathered scientists to plan for a strange aspect of human extinction. Rad
ioactive waste would outlive humans by many thousands of years, the woman said, and would kill anyone who came near it.
It had fallen to the scientists to decide how to warn future archeologists to avoid digging up the deadly waste. Whatever race that might rise after humans had fallen might be more advanced or less so. They couldn’t be counted upon to understand any language now spoken or even understand our symbols. The scientists suggested pillars of screaming, agonized faces.
“Evocative,” Theo had said, “but guaranteed to peak curiosity rather than warn anyone off. The pyramids had warnings, too, but symbols intrigue anyone smart enough to carry a shovel. Warnings and prohibitions do not defeat. They provoke.”
So it was with the tunnel cadavers, each a dire warning to turn back. Ragged tufts of unburned hair clung to white skull bones.
“The tunnel isn’t that long. It only seems long,” Theo said. “We’ll make it through.”
“That’s what all these people thought, isn’t it?” Jaimie whispered back.
“Curiosity kills cats and innocent children and impatient women and men full of empty confidence and anyone suffering from the disease of entitlement. These people expected to pass through at the height of the crisis, in a panic. They thought they could break Quarantine. Quarantine broke them.”
But Jaimie was not haunted by what he saw. To him, the corpses were holy husks. Holy because whatever they had been, their essence was now elsewhere.
Theo must have caught the thought. His father’s disembodied voice came to Jaimie from the darkness behind him. “Ah, because energy can’t be created nor destroyed and you see no auras.”
Theo squeezed the boy’s hand. “Aristotle was asked the definition of the soul. He said it was the essence of the whatness of the being. The essence has fled and glad of it, I’m sure. All tombs are peaceful as long as no one is alive nearby to bestow significance to every life and every place.”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 80