Jaimie detected the empty sound in his father’s voice. He thought it likely that was the first lie his father had spoken to him. But is it a lie if you don’t know it’s a lie?
“Eventually, we’ll have to go to Papa’s farm. Out under that old oak tree, by the stone, that’s where you’ll find it. Southeast from the back step, hidden amongst the stand of Christmas trees my father planted the year after I shot Kenny. That’s the Gateway to the Spirit World. It’s where I go. There would be a symmetry to that. We’ll go there, or maybe I’ll meet you there. Or maybe you’ll have to carry me there. That’s where I should go. I should leave Earth from where D’Arcy Kennigan left.”
Theo turned on his side toward Jaimie, his eyes haunted. “When he died out there, something died in me, too. I already died once, with my friend. I was only ten…but it didn’t hurt that much and it was over quick. I just…it’s the place I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid to die here, but out there, it’ll be okay. That’s where I should be when I’m ready to let go and see what happens next. Out under the stars.”
Jaimie nodded. He wanted to say, “I’ll make sure,” but, of course, he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
The chain of food is upside down
Jaimie had seen his father cry once before, on the phone in the kitchen, when he got the news of Nana Spence’s death. Nana Spence had been Jaimie’s grandmother. She was divorced from Papa Spence and Jaimie had never met her.
The boy watched and wondered about death, a word that seemed to have much more weight than the dictionary conveyed. The dictionary entries were short and clinical, but held no answers. The wizards who had devised language were painters without enough paint on their brushes when it came to the real meaning of death.
Jaimie had examined his father for clues as he received the news of his mother’s demise. Theo held the phone in one hand and in the other he held a bright red apple. As tears crept down his cheeks, Theo listened to Papa Spence describe how she died. He listened a long time, silent and nodding. When Theo looked at the apple, he didn’t know what to do with it. He rubbed his eyes roughly with the back of his hand and stood awkwardly, saying, “Uh-huh…uh-huh…uh-huh…” into the phone.
Jaimie took the apple from his father’s palm gently and watched a tear stream to his father’s chin and hang there, ripe, until it fell to his shirt.
Animals move through the world with more purpose than people do, he thought. Perhaps because they don’t see their ends coming and so, are less distracted from their needs: food, water, shelter, love.
“Love” was a word strangely like death. Countless words had been written about love, but it was no better understood. In that case, Jaimie surmised that the wizards had too much paint on their palette and so their thick illustrations came out black and indecipherable. People said love was like this or like that, but Jaimie was still unclear what it was. People love babies and each other and TV shows and hamburgers. Surely, the word was too flexible.
Why had Theo ruffled Jaimie’s hair while he was on the phone? Jaimie was confused. He guessed at the warmth of his father’s gesture. That looked like love between a father and son. It felt good, but the love his father felt for Nana Spence now? It looked painful. That sort of love did not appear to serve Theo.
As his father recounted D’Arcy Kennigan’s death, had Theo told him a story about boyhood love? Or was it only guilt over an accident that brought on his father’s tears? Had he loved his friend Kenny? Or was it his father’s love of the boy he’d been, before the accident, which gave him such pain now?
Jaimie watched as his father finally cried himself to sleep. Jaimie had seen Anna do that often two years before when she broke up with her first boyfriend. Jack said she was too young to have a serious boyfriend, but Jaimie thought it must matter to Anna very much. For months, she either did not speak or spoke of little else. Jaimie didn’t understand tears, but he understood how something could occupy your mind so much you couldn’t think of anything else.
Obsession is a kind of love, he decided. Jaimie loved dictionaries.
Anna’s first obsession had been a new boy in her class named Thomas. Her first love had lasted three weeks. Then Thomas called Jaimie a retard and Anna got angry and all the kissing stopped. The fighting started. Thomas, who’d been a daily staple, disappeared. Anna seemed furious with Jaimie and he couldn’t understand what he had done wrong. Then she was furious at Thomas again. Later, Anna flew into a rage because Thomas had another girlfriend too soon. Jaimie searched his dictionaries, but he couldn’t find a rule about that.
Jaimie’s obsession with words and their easy confusions irritated and puzzled him, too. Puzzle. There was another annoying homonym: puzzle, the verb; puzzle, the noun. But these were trifles compared to his sister’s mood swings. Anna’s rapid changes in temperament, especially her anger, bewildered him. Anna’s love for Thomas turned to anger in a tornado mix of colors that Jaimie took some pleasure in observing, so rich and deep were the passing hues of her moods. Anna’s aura was most vivid, like moving impressionistic paintings that raged in surprise storms.
“Teenage hormones,” Jack had said.
Love, Jaimie decided, could be understood only in the abstract, the way people understood that the number pi kept on going, but past a thousand places, it became another meaningless word, like “death”, or “mind” or the curious demand to pair “forgive and forget”.
Forgiveness and forgetting do not equate in the dictionary, but Mrs. White, Jaimie’s special teacher at school, frequently told him the words were equal and he should think them so when bad boys called him names.
Around seven in the morning, Jaimie heard a familiar rattle of metal outside. After a moment, Douglas Oliver appeared with a shopping cart full of red gas cans. The old man walked quickly, but he moved like his feet hurt. He leaned heavily on the cart’s handle. The gray colors of exhaustion wrapped around him like an old, wool blanket.
As Jaimie watched, the old man tried the handle on the Bendham’s garage door. It lifted a few inches and then fell back. Oliver tried again twice and then stalked to the end of the driveway and waved to someone down the street to join him.
A thin bearded man on a battered bicycle wheeled up to him. The bicycle was fitted with a large woven basket, secured haphazardly with silver and green duct tape. The basket was filled with things. Some kind of rifle stood high in the basket. It reminded Jaimie of a painting he’d seen of a man on a bicycle with a large basket of bread. The rifle could be like the tall stick of French bread in the painting. (Why French bread? They had American bread, but his family just called it bread.)
When the man on the bicycle turned to look at Mr. Oliver’s house, Jaimie saw who it was. It was Bently, the man Oliver had hit with a bag of cans. Bently seemed to be no danger now.
Oliver spoke quickly, urgently. He pointed to each house on the block, apparently giving instructions. The old man pointed to every house except his own. Oliver pulled the thin little man toward the garage. Together they lifted the door and emptied the bicycle basket of plastic bags. When they were done, only the rifle stayed in the basket.
Jaimie couldn’t see what it was they moved in the garage. When Bently stepped back, he looped a long necklace twice around his neck. Anxious for Bently to leave, Oliver pushed the bicycle at him and shooed him away. Bently shrugged and pedaled slowly down the sidewalk.
Douglas Oliver spun toward the Bendham house. Bently looked back over his shoulder. He did something Jaimie had seen often, but couldn’t find in his dictionary. He put up the middle finger of one hand and pumped it at Mr. Oliver’s back. Anna called it “flipping the bird.” Jaimie wondered if he needed another dictionary so he could discover the secret signals everyone else somehow seemed to know. Where did people go to learn these things?
Theo Spencer rumbled and rasped in his sleep, shifting back and forth on the couch as if pinned under a heavy weight. The washcloth had fallen to his father’s chest. Just as his moth
er did when Anna was sick, Jaimie gently placed the back of his hand on Theo’s forehead. (No one term for the back of the hand. Why not? He’d have to write his own dictionary and remedy that oversight.)
Jaimie plucked the washcloth from Theo, rinsed it in the bowl of water on the floor and wrung it out before placing it carefully on his father’s forehead again. His father stirred and shifted and then settled back down into a snore.
The boy thought about his father’s friend. Kenny was a dead boy who sounded very much alive to his father. His memory had made his father so sad. Memory could be dangerous and, Jaimie thought uncomfortably, his own memory was excellent.
As the boy climbed the stairs to bed, he wondered if ghosts were made real through the power of memory. He thought about the definition of haunted. The feel of the word on the page matched the feeling he got when he had touched his father’s forehead. D’Arcy Kennigan was still alive somehow. His father had the power to make the long dead live.
Jaimie had read Halloween stories about ghosts and curses. When his mother noticed him reading one of those books, she often said, “You know none of those stories are real, right?” But the boy knew his father tended to remember bad things very well while his mother seemed to remember only things that pleased her.
When they argued, his mother sometimes asked Anna, “Do you wanna be right or do you wanna be happy?” That binary choice seemed to sum up his parents. Theo chose being right. Jack chose to forget.
Haunts and curses and ghosts. These things seemed to be coming back to life as the world that was, real and regular, slowly ground to a halt. Jaimie climbed into bed, content as he fell asleep, because sleep was the only time he wasn’t bombarded with flashes of light and disturbing colors and more information than he wanted.
Like a vampire in sleep, the boy closed a lid on a box, blocking out insistent perception. He did not suffer dreams. Sleep brought the relief of darkness. Everyone worried so much about the end of things. Jaimie didn’t understand their concern. He thought death would be black and empty. The fancy word for death is so stark and beautiful, he thought, as he slipped into darkness: oblivion. Such a beautiful word.
But living without his father’s presence, his protection and his hand to hold? That worry chased the boy into a fitful sleep.
If he could have seen the disaster unfolding in London, the boy would not have slept at all.
Now rabid wolves wear the crown
Bored, the woman in red traipsed around the fourth-floor office of the building on Birdcage Walk. The man who owned the office stared up at her from the floor by the photocopier. The hole in his forehead was small and neat. The hole at the back of his head was not.
“Poor wage ape. I’ll call you Allen,” Shiva mused. “You’re going to miss the party, Allen.”
As if she’d voiced a magic spell, she heard the first screams rise. Her wolves were loose. “Ha! Ha! They’re playing my tune, Allen! Sutr-Z has come to call! I wish you could see this, Allen, but you can’t seem to take your eyes off me. Can’t blame you, though. I look great in red. I am the Red Death.”
She went to the window and watched the guards at Buckingham Palace’s outer perimeter. They cocked their heads, turning this way and that to divine the direction of the climbing terror headed their way. Screams bounced and echoed off towers and through the concrete and stone canyons of London’s streets.
“My army is coming, boys. And so many of them. And so hungry. And so angry.”
The screams grew. Many voices answered and became one choir, united in fear.
“Like Genghis Khan, I drive the innocent before me.” She laughed and poured herself another glass of Chardonnay.
To her left, she saw the civilians trying to outrun her army. Precious few were fast enough. A few athletes who looked like they’d be at home on the soccer field ran by fast, wisely not daring to look back.
After them came security men running for their lives like rabbits from a relentless predator. The hunters had become game. The police officers, most dressed in riot gear, cast off their armour as they ran, trying to gain speed. They headed for the fortress that was Buckingham Palace.
Shiva toasted their efforts. “Allen, I think this is an excellent time to quote Lewis Carroll. My father wanted me to become an English teacher instead of a virologist. Imagine what would have happened if I’d let him have his way? Today would be just another boring day of slavery.”
Men, women and children, young and old, were driven before the horde. Any who fell were set upon with teeth. The slowest were swallowed into the crowd and, with one bite, added to Shiva’s army.
Shiva cleared her throat. “Pay attention, Allen. I recited this in school and haven’t lost a line, I’m sure! ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Callooh-effin’-Callay!’ She chortled in her joy!’ Well…I skipped over a lot to get to the meat of the issue.”
The woman in red took another sip of wine and pulled her chair up to the window to watch her army’s rampage. Below her, a man — well, what had once been a man — launched himself at the legs of a woman carrying a child. He sunk his teeth into her calf before she hit the pavement. Two women, dressed as nurses, went for the child, each pulling an arm as if in a tug-of-war. The dispute was settled when another ghoul ripped the child away.
“Allen, this is getting distasteful. I think it’s time I let the authorities know they aren’t the authorities anymore.”
She opened her purse and took out her cell phone. She put the battery back in and sat back to wait. Before she took two breaths, her phone purred and vibrated.
* * *
Dr. Craig Sinjin-Smythe ran from the thunder. The pounding of thousands of feet came first. Then a shout followed by screams. Then more screams until the shrieks built to an unholy din.
The doctor broke into an office building off Maiden Lane. He noted there was a North Face store nearby. If all went according to plan, that could prove useful. Alarms sounded, but security forces were spread far too thinly for him to worry about the police. But Interpol did worry Sinjin-Smythe. Since the compromise of the isolation unit at Cambridge, undoubtedly he would shoulder the blame.
His dentist, Dr. Neil McInerney, operated a clinic in a second floor suite of the building. From his vantage point, the running crowds below were far too close. The uninfected were driven from their homes by the infected and run to ground, rabid hounds on timid foxes.
Sinjin-Smythe’s cell battery flashed low and he was grateful to find that the power was still on. He’d grabbed his charger in his rush out of his office, but he hadn’t dared to put his phone’s battery back in place until he was miles away from the explosion.
He also had a memory stick with all the research files he had on the Sutr Virus. If Interpol showed up, he might have to bargain with that to live. He reasoned he was too valuable to jail. But it wasn’t beyond the authorities to put him back to work, jailed in a lab.
He’d been trying to call his fiancée for hours, always on the move and far from the ruins of his laboratory and not daring to go home. If Interpol had Ava, they would answer and tell him to give himself up for questioning. It was reasonable to assume the love of his life, Ava Keres, was dead of the virus.
He tried calling her again from the dentist’s phone. He hadn’t had much hope since the landlines were usually clogged. Not so, now. It rang.
The landline worked, but he got Ava’s voicemail: “I’m not available to take your call right now. I’m probably in the loo or handling some desperately dangerous chemicals so if you could leave a message, that would be brilliant. Or, if you’re calling to sell me something, please do kill yourself. Cheers!”
As the mob careened by below him, he put one hand over his other ear to block out the screams.
Sinjin-Smythe left a voice message on her phone: “Darling, if you get this message, I want you to know that I still love you and whatever is going on, we can work it out somehow. I’m sorry if I did somethi
ng which would make you…which would make this happen. The lab’s gone red, Ava. You and I are the only ones who got out. The powers that be will have questions.
“I’m going to turn my phone on and off sporadically because I want to talk to you before I talk to Interpol. If you can get this message, you can call me. Call me, Ava. I love you and I think I have a way for us to get away from this mess and work out some answers. Call me, please. I need to know you’re okay.”
He would have cried, but there wasn’t time. In case Ava was alive, he had to arrange the escape route he hoped for. He looked to the wall. Opposite the dental chair where he’d received his last cleaning, Sinjin-Smythe gazed at the framed photo of Dr. Neil McInerney standing proudly at the helm of his 24-foot sailboat.
The virologist stabbed a button on the office phone marked “home” and called his dentist for an emergency appointment.
Human jaws become monsters' maws
Jaimie wandered downstairs, ravenously hungry. It was 11 a.m. His mother gave him a nod and a bowl of canned stew.
Anna was reading a book called Murders Among Dead Trees at the kitchen counter. She glanced up at her brother and smiled. “Siddown, sleepyhead. There are fires downtown. There’s nothing on the radio about it, but you can see plumes of smoke from the backyard.”
Jaimie spooned the stew into his mouth in a hurry and returned to the stove for more.
“No, Jaimie,” Jack said. “You can’t have more.”
Jaimie stood still, holding the bowl out to his mother.
“We’re rationing.” She was stern. “Go look that up. Rationing.”
Anna got up and took the bowl from her brother. “Easy, mom. He can have my share. I can’t eat, anyway.”
Jack put her hand to her daughter’s cheek. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Sure,” said Anna. “I felt a bit queasy this morning but I’m okay now.”
This Plague of Days OMNIBUS EDITION: The Complete Three Seasons of the Zombie Apocalypse Series Page 17