I’m not afraid, Dad, Jaimie thought. I’m just wondering where their whatness went.
* * *
Mitch had tied a strip of cloth around his daughter’s eyes. Lane whimpered amidst tiny bird breaths pumping air in and out fast.
Jack held one of Lane’s hands and could feel her pulse beating like that of a hummingbird. Their palms were slick, but they managed to hold on to each other with trembling fingers.
The close proximity of the dead made their fear worse. In the sweep and flash of Mitch’s light, the dead waited. The refugees squeezed by, still holding hands, trying to remember each corpse’s position in the darkness, wary of tripping, touching, or allowing the once-people to touch them. In the dark, it was easy to imagine these corpses turning their heads to look their way through the gaping spaces in their skulls where eyes had once been. In the darkness they could reach out for them, circle them, and make the travelers join their lonely watch.
Now they knew why so few people came this way. There were other ways into and out of the city. Many travelers decided to chance the longer options. There were dangers elsewhere, but other dangers could melt with a panoply of horrors.
This was a unique place ruled by rats. The noisy rodents’ fat, long tails dragged and bumped as they scurried aside along walls and edges and outstretched arms.
The Spencers didn’t know the name of the tunnel. As they reached the bottom and began their ascent, Anna dubbed it the Tunnel of Ghosts.
Jaimie stepped on something that squished to rotten goo under his weight. The boy looked back. He could feel his father’s hand in his but he could not see Theo Spencer in the pitch of the tunnel’s throat.
“Mitch thinks we failed because we lacked humanity in the face of death,” Theo said. “I think we failed because we didn’t live more and better before the Sutr plague came for us.”
Let’s talk when this is over, Dad, Jaimie thought. All you and Mom and Anna think about is the past. I’m busy building the future.
“Like Shiva?”
No. Shiva wants to build the world around herself, to reflect her glory. I don’t want to be in this world at all. Ghosts are lucky. I’d enjoy invisibility.
His father answered with a chuckle that echoed eerily off the tunnel’s tile walls.
The kid wasn't always good, sometimes awful
It was close to eight when they emerged on the other end of the tunnel to weak, rising sunshine. They were grateful for it, and perhaps for the first time in a long time, Jack and Anna felt grateful to be alive.
They gulped the fresh air, eager to expel the dust from their lungs. They breathed in chilled air that cleansed their blood and cleared their heads.
Beyond piled heaps of burned bodies and a slouching wall of sandbags, the road opened up again to a scattering of cars. The way East was clear.
“Thanks for your help with my girl in the tunnel,” Mitch said. “Me and Lane are headed North, cross country. There are people gathering up there somewhere, I’m told. They’re rebuilding something up there. Trying for better.”
“I often wonder,” Jack said, “how long before I can go get a burger? How long before I can pick up my glasses at Lenscrafters in an hour? Will I ever get to suffer through the indignity of a mammogram?”
Mitch laughed and shrugged. “We went without that stuff for a long time.”
“Sure, before we had them. Now we know what we’re missing,” Jack said.
“It’s not so bad,” Anna said. “I really want to talk to my boyfriend right now. That’s really what I miss most. But I’ll settle for finding a car and getting as far away from that tunnel as we can. Fast.”
Mitch smiled. “Kids are tougher than we think. Maybe it’s denial, but if that works, I say bring on denial.”
“It’s not denial,” Anna said, annoyed. “It’s a brave, new world,” Anna said. “Or we’ll make it that way.”
“Huxley!” Jaimie said, startling them all.
Mitch swept his daughter up as Jack struggled to untangle Lane’s hair from the knot she made of the cloth blindfold. When Jack was done, Lane smiled, “Thank you. You’re nice.”
Jack smiled. “You’re welcome.”
The child’s gaze settled on Jaimie. “Tell your mom.”
Jaimie looked away and became a statue. It was the next best thing to the invisibility he craved.
Anna looked stricken. “Tell Mom what?”
Lane slipped off her pink Hello Kitty backpack and dug through it. When she straightened, the child held a book in her hand.
Jaimie relaxed and Anna’s shoulders fell. The boy stepped forward, excited. He even dared to look the child in the eyes.
Mitch cleared his throat. “When I was driving truck, I heard a lot of crazy stuff on the radio. AM radio was always good company. All that silly stuff kept me awake on the long hauls, but so many people believing crazy stuff didn’t convince me of anything crazy. For instance, forty-eight percent of Americans believe UFOs are aliens coming to Earth and giving us the hairy eyeball. I never bought that. I think there are lots of explanations for lights in the sky. I think that might mean forty-eight percent of people want to be a little crazy or can’t hardly help it. I can tell you with certainty, I’m not a man given to whimsy. When Lane came to me, talking about a little girl walking beside us, you can imagine what I thought. Her mother had just died. Horrors were all around. I thought Laney got herself an imaginary friend and I was all for it. We all need friends.”
“And then?” Jack asked.
“Her imaginary friend’s name is Aasa. Aasa told her she needed us to find a book.”
Mitch’s cheeks reddened. “I didn’t give the idea enough care. Jill read to Lane every night at bedtime. I put Lane off, figuring we’d run into a bookstore or a library in our travels eventually and the book Lane wanted to get…was told to get…is in just about any and every bookstore. I was more concerned about finding food, to tell the truth.”
“I follow his rules,” Lane said. “I told Daddy he had to follow orders, too.”
Mitch cleared his throat, looking embarrassed. “Lane didn’t want me to shoplift a new copy of Goodnight Moon. She said her friend told her I was to do as I was told for The Way of Things.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
Mitch shrugged. “I dunno. Sounded like a high school biology textbook to me. But Laney can be a bit of a whiner.”
“Pestinstant,” Lane said.
Jaimie shuddered and corrected the girl. “Persistent.”
“No,” Mitch said. “Instant pest. Pest-instant. She got it right. Little family joke.”
“I get it,” Jack said. She eyed the book in Lane’s hand and held out her hand.
The little girl smiled as she placed the little hardcover in Jack’s hand.
Jack looked at the title and laughed. “The imaginary friend, I understand. We’ve all had them. The Way of Things? That’s just weird. But this?”
Lane snatched the book back. “Not for you then!” The girl ran to Jaimie and held out the gift.
“It’s real, Mrs. Spencer.” Mitch tried to pat Jack on the back but she recoiled.
“I think you listened to that AM radio too long, after all.”
Mitch nodded. “I’d give you that, except later, your son appeared to me in a dream. He told me I was to meet you folks at the mouth of the tunnel at the East end of Montreal. We waited a week. You showed up. How do you explain that?”
“Orders from whom? From Jaimie?”
“He said the same thing as the little girl Laney saw. It was The Way of Things slingin’ orders.”
Jack sighed. “You heard the phrase once and it made its way into your dreams. Happens all the time and we’ve all been under strain — ”
“You wouldn’t think it, given Laney being so young, but she’s quite an artist. Got it from her mother. Laney, let Mrs. Spencer look in the book. It’s okay.”
The child handed the book
back, reluctantly. “Look inside the front cover of that book, Jack.”
Jack opened the small book and paged back to the inside cover. Tears filled her eyes as she gazed at the drawing in crayon.
The picture Lane had drawn showed a passable likeness of Jaimie Spencer. The child had made the ears far too big, but it was Jaimie. Lane had trouble drawing hands, too, but it was clear Jaimie was holding hands with an uncanny likeness of Theo.
Jack closed the book and stared at the cover a moment before handing it to her son. “What’s it mean?”
“You know what it means,” Theo told his wife softly.
Jaimie stared at the cover, disappointed it was not a dictionary.
At Theo’s urging, Jaimie knelt and did something he had never done before. He offered his hand to a stranger.
The little girl didn’t hesitate to hold Jaimie’s hand. He squeezed and was about to let go, but Lane held tight and pumped an exaggerated handshake.
Jaimie stood and, after an awkward pause, reached out again and let his hand rest ever-so-lightly on the little girl’s head. “Amazing Lane,” he said.
Dimly, the child understood the gesture as more than a thank you. It was a blessing as solemn and profound as any of the ceremonies she’d witnessed in church.
Jaimie stepped back. He hugged the book to his chest. By its nature, this book was both a blessing and a curse. It was The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
Serving dark forces, unknown, unlawful
His Twin Otter bucked and dipped as George Enfry piloted the aircraft low over Lake Ontario. His sole passenger had thrown up when they’d hit heavy weather over Lake Superior. The cabin still stunk of stomach acid and Doritos. Enfry dipped his head and assured her it had happened plenty of times in the past. It hadn’t. Enfry couldn’t wait to get rid of Dr. Ellen Harper.
Lake Ontario was a bit choppy but, as he’d seen in his dream, the Oswego Canal was a glass runway. Oswego’s Excess Flow Management Facility, marked by white towers and massive industrial tanks, squatted on the West side of the canal. The boy with mirrors for eyes had shown Enfry that landmark in his dreams.
Relieved to feel the familiar bump and roar upon landing, Enfry pointed the Twin Otter toward the East side of the canal, opposite the tank towers.
Enfry’s mission was to meet two people. A man and a woman, but a mob of people crowded the dock, waving him in. Enfry shut off the engine and drifted, letting the seaplane come to rest a couple of hundred feet short of mooring.
The Twin Otter rocked gently as Enfry opened his door and stepped down to the pontoon to drop a small anchor and tie it off.
“Hey!” a burly man called from the dock. “C’mon in! We need to talk!”
Enfry ignored the man and told his passenger to open her door. “Let’s air it out some.”
A conference among the assembled had begun. Some voices sounded angry and they all sounded urgent.
The burly man, apparently the self-appointed leader of the group, stepped closer to the edge of the dock. “What can you tell us about what’s going on?”
Enfry scratched his chin and thought for a moment. “Everything’s crazy.”
“That it?”
“Pretty much.”
“You need gas for that thing. Want to trade gas for a ride?”
Enfry shook his head. He was low on gas, but he’d find another place to refuel, one without a mulling mob breathing down his neck. The Twin Otter wasn’t fancy, but in times like these it was priceless.
The burly man persisted. “What do you want for a ride? I don’t need to go far.”
“If that were so, I imagine you’d have walked it or drove by now.”
That stirred the crowd to the staccato of angry epithets aimed his way.
“Dr. Harper?” Enfry asked. “Would you hand me the paddle that’s lashed to the floor by your seat, please? I might need it.”
She did as she was told. “Are you going to paddle farther out? If they throw stones — ”
“They don’t want to damage the aircraft, but if they start swimming out here, somebody’s gonna get a paddling.”
“Why don’t you have a gun?”
“Had several. Passengers stole them.”
“How could you let that happen?”
“Had to sleep sometime.”
“Okay, so where are your new passengers? I’ve got to get to Montreal.”
Enfry’s watch battery had died and he hadn’t had the opportunity to replace it. The watch had been a gift from his wife, Sally. He didn’t want another watch and even if he could get another battery, he wasn’t sure he could change the battery easily. There was no replacing Sally, either.
The problem with being rich with valuable things — his plane and precious Sally, for instance — was that he couldn’t dare to leave them unattended.
If he asked someone to get the things he needed, they never wanted to trade anything but a ride to find relatives.
Since the end of the world began, he’d ferried many people. He’d been paid with items as banal as a bit of food and just enough toilet paper to wipe away the leavings of that food. It was tantamount to blackmail, but the Twin Otter was his home for as long as the fuel lasted.
George Enfry had been a commercial pilot flying a seven million dollar aircraft around North America, transporting packages. When his bosses died, there was no company anymore. Then Sally got the flu. Then all George had left was the Twin Otter. He was a man slowly but surely getting whittled down to nothing.
“What happens when there’s no more gas left to fly?” George had asked the Dream Boy.
Jaimie said there’d be life after the gas ran out, but only if Enfry cooperated. More blackmail.
In Enfry’s experience, most of his passengers found their families dead. The best case scenario so far had been for people to return to their childhood home to find it empty. For most of those he ferried, he never found out what happened to them. They saw their hometowns and ran off. Carrying unreasonable hopes, they hurried away, calling for their friends and families.
Enfry did as the Dream Boy asked. Then, last night, Jaimie Spencer had come to him again with a new mission. The boy didn’t know all the details yet. He’d talked to a young girl who had given him sparse instructions. Enfry would be part of what she called “the lightning strike.”
Battle plans were being formed. George Enfry, who had never raised a hand to anyone, would play an important role in the coming war.
“What about after the war?”
The boy fell silent.
Enfry surprised himself by admitting to the boy that he was not a brave man.
“I’m not brave, either,” Jaimie told him. “Brave isn’t necessary. Action is all that is required.”
* * *
The mob on the dock yelled louder, bringing Enfry back to the present. As he predicted, someone pulled off his shoes and socks, jumped into the water, and swam toward the plane. He’d guessed the burly man would push somebody in or brave the cold water himself. Instead, it was a tall, lanky man playing pirate.
“Just let’s talk about this!” the swimmer called. “Let me on board.”
“You let him on board and we’ll have to fight to get him off,” Dr. Harper said. “More of them will be coming next and we’ll be overwhelmed.”
Enfry sighed, picked up the paddle, and called to the man in the water. “You don’t want to do that.”
“I got people I have to find out West! Los Angeles!”
“I just came from the West. I’m not headed back that way. Sorry to say, LA has no water. It’s dead.”
The swimmer was about to reply when he stopped abruptly and began to flail at the brown water. Shrieking and cursing, the man turned back toward shore. On the way toward the seaplane, he’d been graceful. Heading back, his arms pinwheeled and he splashed furiously.
“What is it, Armand?” the burly man called. “Get back out there. We need that plane!”
Several people rushed forward and the burly man was knocked into the water. He cursed. Then he cursed louder and longer, clawing at the dock. “Help me up! Help me up! Oh, by Jesus, it hurts!”
When their friends pulled them up, the rescuers sprang back screaming. The tall man named Armand had lost a toe and a long fish had sunk its teeth into the meat of his thigh by his groin.
As he flopped to the dock, he tried to pull the creature off. The fish thrashed and its jaws held tight. Armand howled even louder.
Another fish, identical to the first, appeared to be burrowing into the burly man’s guts. The man looked down, staring in disbelief at what was happening to him.
A woman, thinking quick, grabbed the fish’s tail and tried to pull it off. The burly man screamed and fainted. The sound of the back of his head hitting the wooden dock made a hollow sound.
The fish let go and the woman threw it back into the water. Then she threw up.
The crowd at the dock was thicker now, but they kept their distance. The same question rose to everyone’s lips. “What is that thing?”
The woman who’d vomited into the water climbed up from her hands and knees. “Frankenfish!” she announced. “Get that thing off Armand!”
Armand kept screaming for help and the fish kept chewing northward toward his crotch.
The crowd backed away and the same woman who’d saved the burly man wiped her mouth on her sleeve and tugged on the long, slippery body of Armand’s toothy attacker.
Finally, the fish let go and Armand scrambled away, leaving a bloody trail from high on his thigh and from the empty space where his left big toe had once been. The tall man sounded like he was yodeling as he collapsed into the arms of onlookers.
The fish flopped on the dock, but it was not dying. It was very much alive and snapping. It could breathe out of the water. The pre-historic- looking beast began to slither forward, advancing past the woman on the dock, fixated on the mob.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 81