The women smiled again when Jack's thought burbled up between them: That sounds more hippie, not less.
Jack sobered quickly. "I've been trying to communicate with my son all of his life. The autism — ”
Dayo and Jack exchanged thoughts faster than they could speak, and with greater certainty of each other’s meaning:
Why didn't he talk to you when he could? Dayo leaned closer, reached around Jack and hugged her with one arm. You're his mother. He didn't want to worry you.
Just like Aasa just did…Jaimie shut me out. Again. I’m always outside his castle.
He wanted to keep you safe in the dark, Dayo told her.
Jack shook her head, unsatisfied. He talked to all of you.
I don't think you were part of the plan, Jack. Not everybody gets drafted.
Aastha, who had been taking in their exchange, raised a hand in protest. "Jaimie hardly ever spoke to me in my dreams!"
"I can tell you something about your son," Aasa said.
Jack showed her an open palm. It was a casual gesture, but Jack's thoughts gave away the strength of her need. She was pleading to know more.
"Jaimie has a different relationship to time than most people. His mind is very busy."
Processing, Dayo thought.
"Yes," Aasa said. "Processing. We're joining him in that, I guess. I mean, when we could all suddenly read each other's minds, we got over the shock remarkably quickly."
Jack nodded. "The first time I saw a color screen on a computer boot up, I was amazed. Every time I started a computer after that, all I could think was, 'C'mon! Hurry up! Faster!'"
Aasa smiled. “Most of us mark time with milestones: get up, eat, eat again at noon, eat again around dark and go to sleep. Imagine each day had hundreds, thousands of milestones. For Jaimie, his hours have more minutes because he doesn't forget anything. His is a very rich world. It's so overwhelming, he has to shut us out. Call it autism, if you want. For someone so sensitive to the onslaught of the world, I'd call it a shield."
"Please, tell me more."
"The Alpha's awareness rose to match his, seeing the world through a wider spectrum. The Sutr virus did that. But for Jaimie, he got that perspective as a genetic gift since birth."
"He's a fluke," Jack said. "Is that why whatever-it-is chose him to be the messenger for the war?"
"Despite his disadvantages, he was well-placed, yes. You feel left out, but you're part of this. Without you and Anna, who would have protected him while he slept? He raised two armies."
"For The Way of Things."
"No," Aasa said. "For you."
Jack's eyes filled with tears.
"Jaimie's remarkable. His gifts are too remarkable to be accidental. Don't think he was a fluke. It's part of a plan set in motion a long time ago."
“Everything has fallen apart so badly…" Jack said. "If there's a plan, it sure looks like an evil one."
"Good. Bad. It's all change. Change was needed. We weren't going to do it on our own."
"I'll never be able to see the world that way! A world flu pandemic? Monsters? Cannibals? C'mon!" A wave of embarrassment heated Jack's scalp when she realized how harsh she sounded. She was, after all, arguing with a little girl.
Once again, a quick exchange of thoughts served better than spoken words because Jack understood the strength of Aasa’s feelings when she received the message: Please don't think of me as a little girl. Think of me as a person.
Jack straightened as if she'd been slapped. You sound like my daughter.
Your daughter feels the same way, doesn’t she?
She does and I'm sorry. You’re both right. I’d forgotten what it feels like not to be listened to because of your age. I patched that up with Anna, just in time, but it seems being this way is a habit. I’ll stop.
Aasa accepted the apology immediately and Jack felt her forgiveness. Arguments not only resolved faster telepathically, but completely. Reading minds was like the difference between reading a book and watching the movie of the book. Depth of feeling created greater understanding. Jack recognized her pattern now. She spent too much time needing to be right instead of listening and letting others be heard. She’d spent much of her life waiting to speak while others were talking rather than engaging what was actually said. Conversations had been contests, but no more.
"Can you tell me more about my son, Aasa?" Jack asked softly.
"We see everything like, this happened and this happened and this happened. Jaimie sees all the colors of all the words. He sees the auras and remembers everything and…he feels everything. He needs that shield."
Aasa caught the flicker of doubt in Jack's mind. "Yes, often people on the autistic spectrum are thought to be…aloof, but Jaimie loves you, Mrs. Spencer. I know you've always doubted that, but he does feel love. Of course, he does. He just can't show it. A broken telephone doesn't mean nobody's home. Don't ever doubt his love for you."
Jack wept, this time in gratitude. “I’m sorry. Sometimes, with Jaimie’s autism, it’s felt like living with a coma patient. You hope they hear you. You hope they’ll wake up and talk any moment, but the wait stretches out and you worry they’re trapped in there. That their world isn’t rich. That they don’t or won’t have a life.”
Dayo hugged Jack tight. “Don’t be sorry. It’s okay. Let it out. He’s here. He knows. He knows everything.”
After a few minutes passed, Dayo cleared her throat. "You've changed a lot, too, Aasa. You sound so grown up."
Aasa looked pleased. "Jaimie calls it 'plugged in.' I can hear so many voices, not just The Way of Things."
"What's it like?"
"It feels like I was in a small, dark room and now I'm out in a large space and it's very bright, with many beautiful voices telling me things, feeding me. It’s like my brain was fuzzy before, but I didn’t know it until the fog lifted.”
As Aasa described the feeling, she also shared it telepathically so Dayo and Jack and Aastha could feel it, too.
"Oh. It's like having Wikipedia and Google in your head," Dayo said.
"There's more," Aasa said. "After this, there's still much more. If we win tonight, it's like turning a key to a huge machine that's powered by the turning of the Earth. It'll connect us all. We'll all be plugged in. We'll all see a possible future."
"What then?" Jack asked.
"Then it will be up to us to work together to build it. First it's possible, then it's probable, then it's real."
Jack wanted to believe they'd win the war, but when she looked at her son, she didn't see a divine messenger or a general. She saw her little boy, discovering new words in the dictionary and never daring to look her in the eyes.
Jaimie must have allowed her thoughts in because he tore his gaze from the stars and he finally met her eyes.
Despite all of Aasa's soothing words of hope for the future, Jack's heart skipped a cold beat. Her son was terrified.
* * *
Since the plague began, too many stories had ended badly. Just when Jaimie thought he knew the outcome, something went terribly wrong.
Maybe The Way of Things made Aasa these grand promises to make them fight instead of giving them the chance to run or hide. The Way of Things had already killed billions. Maybe all It wanted was to see a good fight to the death.
The Way of Things had given him The Army of Light. They were his gladiators. But as Jaimie looked from one face to another, he saw Christians marching blindly into the Coliseum.
And Misericordia? The lion.
Know tragedy, but find triumph amid the suicidal
Dark squares and rectangles loomed and closed in from each side. The truck rattled through the abandoned town of Poeticule Bay.
Jaimie stood in the back of the truck to see where they were going. As they crested the hill, he could smell salt and blood on the cool Atlantic breeze.
The zombie army stood on the beach transfixed by the lamp of the full moon. They did as Aasa ordere
d for now. When the trance broke, he knew they could prove undisciplined. Mindless, they could be dangerous, but, if it came to that, he hoped the Sutr-Zs would be too busy attacking Misericordia to bother with him.
They pulled up to the lighthouse. It was lit, pulsing its slow, white strobe. The Poeticule Bay lighthouse had one plastic bulb the size of a human fist. Every seven seconds, it turned night into day.
Jaimie could feel that the light irritated the Sutr-Z infected, distracting them from their command to watch the moon.
Aasa stood in front of Jaimie. “I know you’re afraid, she said. “You got too much at once before. Just plug in through me so you don’t hear everyone at once. You’ll just hear me, I promise. I’m the filter.”
Jaimie reached out and clasped Aasa’s hand. The girl’s eyes rolled up to the whites and her jaw dropped open.
“Whoa!” Dayo said. “That is freaky!”
“Bokor,” she said in a low voice.
The Army of Light stiffened to attention. Somehow, the power of the thought reached down into their lizard brains and commanded them. “Hold,” Aasa said. Do not move!
Jaimie dropped Aasa’s hand and she blinked. Her eyes were normal again. The little girl looked up at him and nodded. “Everything is in place as you ordered…General.”
Jaimie took a deep breath, nodded slightly and pulled his hoodie up against the rising wind. Even without touching the girl’s hand, the strong connection between them remained.
Aasa took her sister by the arm and Aastha pulled Dayo toward the lighthouse.
Jack turned back to her brother-in-law. Cliff had remained behind the wheel of the truck.
“You coming up?” Jack asked.
Cliff Spencer looked out at the ocean and the sea of zombies silhouetted in the moonlight. Beached whales dotted the beach and the smell of their blood permeated the air. His eyes were pie plates and his jaw was slack. “Um…” he said. “I’ll keep it running.”
“Fine. Stay in the truck.”
“In case we need to make a quick getaway.”
“Sure,” Jack said. She paused at the door at the base of the tower, watching Jaimie survey the beach.
“C’mon, Jack,” Dayo called gently. “Our place is up there, above the fray. We’ll see everything up there. Don’t look at the light as we go up or it will blind you.”
“I’ve been blind a long time,” she said absently. “My quiet little boy isn’t a boy. He’s a man.”
The sound of the attack helicopter’s whirring rotors told them they had arrived just in time. The last battle was about to begin.
“Good luck, son! I love you!”
Jaimie did not look back and Jack didn’t wait for some sign of acknowledgement. Her son loved her back.
Knowing was enough.
* * *
High above him on the lighthouse deck, Aasa pointed at a pinpoint of light in the sky as it grew larger. “Fiat iustitia, or justitia, ruat caelum!” Aasa announced.
“Oh, no, not you, too,” Jack said.
Aasa laughed and Dayo, Aastha joined her. “I plugged into Jaimie for a minute there. It was on his mind. That and Sun Tzu and the periodic table.”
Dayo rolled her eyes. “What?”
Aasa shrugged. “You want to know what it means?”
“I guess,” Dayo allowed.
“The Latin means, ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War and that’s where Jaimie’s getting his strategy.
“But…the periodic table?” Jack’s curiosity had given way to irritation.
Aasa shrugged. “Dr. Sinjin-Smythe gave Jaimie the idea.”
Dayo’s eyes narrowed. “How so?”
“Not directly. He talked about the periodic table and Jaimie read The Art of War and…Jaimie makes associations between words that aren’t linear. It’s just the way his brain works.”
“What about the periodic table?” Jack asked. “Tell us.”
“Oh, not the one you’re thinking of. The first periodic table. The one with only five elements.”
“I don’t understand,” Aastha said.
“Jaimie does,” Aasa said. “I’ll explain it to you as we go.”
Touch the horror of reluctant homicide
The attack helicopter buzzed the shoreline and the zombie army, distracted once more from the glow of the moon, growled.
Instead of landing, the helicopter slipped higher into the night and away to the North. It disappeared from sight.
From their post atop the lighthouse, Jack, Dayo and the Vermer girls could hear the rotors echoing off Mt. Hanley. The sound of the helicopter slowly receded to a murmur as it swung inland behind Poeticule Bay.
“Recon,” Dayo said. “I knew this wasn’t going to go down easy.”
A moment later, the helicopter gunship appeared above the treetops and buzzed the lighthouse. It hung above them for a moment and, in the flash, they saw Misericordia. The monster waved and smiled at the little girls.
“What does he want?” Aastha asked.
“Brains,” Aasa said.
Aastha hugged her big sister and shuddered. “Big teeth, big fish.”
“His name was Wiggins,” Jack said. “And now he’s…whatever that is.”
Vigilax turned the helicopter abruptly and flew down the dark shoreline. A moment later they returned and hung in the air, one hundred meters offshore, to survey the battleground.
“Aasa? Can the Alphas hear our thoughts?” Dayo asked.
“No. They get the teeth and super strength. We get the community and thought integration.”
“I’d rather have nine inch fangs, razors for claws and a small nuclear bomb right about now,” Dayo replied.
“Don’t worry. The Way of Things says this has played out before,” Aasa said. The thought-pictures came fast. Aasa showed them early hunters, pink-skinned and vulnerable, throwing spears at a sabre-tooth tiger.
“If this goes badly, my brother-in-law is at the bottom of the stairs in the truck,” Jack said. “Be ready to run.”
Dayo squeezed Jack’s shoulder. “If Plan A doesn’t work, there is no point in a Plan B. They’ll just run us down.”
* * *
The Alphas did not land the attack helicopter. From the pilot’s seat, Vigilax gestured for Misericordia to put on his helmet so they could hear each other above the rotor chop.
“That’s a lot of zombies down there, Boss,” Vigilax said. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” He pointed at the dark hulks of dead whales along the water’s edge. “Wild, man!”
The Alphas didn’t need the gunship’s infrared targeting scanners to see. The heads-up display was actually too bright for their enhanced vision. However, Misericordia found what he was looking for immediately.
“Dead ahead!” Misericordia pointed to a solitary figure in a hoodie, swathed in a yellow aura. “On the high, flat rock at the lowest of low tide under a full moon in Poeticule Bay, Maine in front of the lighthouse. That’s where he said to meet and here we are. Finally, I get to meet my emancipator. I’m going to free him in return.”
Standing at attention amid the tidal pools, stones and black rock, the zombie horde formed a half-circle behind the figure, ringing him in. Misericordia chuckled. “It’s to be a cage match.”
The Alphas watched as the figure in the hoodie struck bright, red flares and raised them high in the shape of a cross.
Misericordia cackled. “Hilarious. Does he think I’m allergic to garlic alfredo, too? That I can’t see myself in a mirror? Somebody’s seen too many B movies!”
“It’s an invitation to land, sir,” Vigilax said. “As soon as you go down there, they’ll all attack. It’s an obvious trap.”
Misericordia nodded. “It’s the arrogance of a species that’s hung around too long without changing. Everybody hates the new kid on the genetic block, especially since we’re such an improvement on the old model! The kid is challenging me to a
fight. As if we’re stupid!”
The head vampire climbed out of the co-pilot’s seat and moved to the rear cabin. The rotor wash blew in salt and cold as he slid back the helicopter’s long side door. Misericordia swung out the heavy machine gun mounted there and climbed into the seat behind it.
“First, we even the odds. Then I’ll have a chat with young Mr. Spencer about his hubris.”
“You want me to put a missile down his throat, Chief?”
“Of course not! I want him to call me ‘Dad.’”
“Oh.”
“Hey, Vigi! How many zombies down there, do you think?”
“Hundreds. Maybe a thousand or more!”
Misericordia cackled. “We’ve got lots more ammunition than that, mate!” He fired the big machine gun and it began pounding in his hands. Hundreds of rounds wound through the machine gun, spilling hot brass into the black water below.
The Army of Light stood on the rocky shore as they’d been ordered, growling with growing agitation, but still as statues. The Sutr-Z infected were cut down, cut in half and chopped up.
Only Jaimie, with his sensitive hearing, could detect Misericordia’s demented laughter above the din of the hammering gun.
The big gun paused in its chattering long enough for Vigilax to fire two missiles, one to the North and one to the South, at the edges of the zombie horde. Two hulks of whale carcass exploded into fountains of rotting meat in the moonlight and showered the shore in blood and bone.
Those infected caught in the explosions stumbled and screamed and died in the rain of shrapnel. The rest of the Army of Light held their positions, but each mouth opened and emitted a terrible sound. The Sutr-Z choir was one part gravel, one part pain and two parts rage.
Each of the remaining infected, no matter how dull, recognized the loss of their kind. If the sound they made could be called a song, its title would be Anguish, Frustration, Fury.
Jaimie watched the destruction of his forces and found he was sad for their sacrifice. Each of the infected had once slept in a warm bed and cooked their food and felt joy. They’d all been children who had delighted their parents with first steps and first words. Some of the zombie army were still children.
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