“Why?”
“I don’t have real evidence, I suppose, but your dad and I have changed our minds about the old guy. We’ve decided to watch him more carefully. After this trip to the mall, and if the city’s fire burns itself out, I think we’ll move back home.”
Anna smiled wider. “I’m good with that. I want to sleep in my own bed. The one I’m in is lumpy.”
“Good. It’s decided then. And don’t worry. We’ll go to the mall and see what supplies we can find. If the old guy steps out of line, I’ll find some sweet and sour sauce packets in the food court and I’ll eat him myself, starting with his lying face.”
Don't bother hiding under the bed
Oliver, Jack, Anna and Jaimie left at five in the afternoon. “It’s only a few blocks, Theo,” Jack told him. “Have a nap and we’ll be right back.”
“Isn’t that what they say in every horror movie before something terrible happens?”
“Shut up, love. Sleep.”
Theo Spencer looked up at his wife, weary, but his eyes were brighter. “I love you, too.”
Jaimie tried to take his huge English dictionary but his sister took it from him gently. She held up his little paperback of Latin phrases and put it in the bottom of his school backpack. Jack and Anna’s backpacks remained empty. They hoped they would be able to pack them full of useful finds for the trip home.
The old man carried a long walking stick in one hand and the can of bear spray in the other. The spray was a short, fat yellow can fitted with a bright red nozzle and a trigger. A strap circled Oliver’s wrist so he couldn’t drop it. “Works on humans, too,” he said. “Like squeezing a skunk in their eyes. Very discouraging.”
The mall was only four blocks away. Jack and her children came to a halt at once as they came to the top of Misericordia Drive where it spilled onto the thoroughfare that was Fanshawe Park Road.
A fire engine lay on its side up the street. It was a ladder truck and the longest ladder with a basket atop it splayed out in two lengths along the pavement. The forgotten machine looked like a broken dinosaur carcass.
“The ’40s and ’50s had the mushroom cloud. The ’60s had flower power and the rocket to the moon. The ’70s had disco, the ’80s and ’90s were run by a stock ticker, and the 2000s had the World Trade Center attack.” Oliver pointed with his chin toward the wreck. “There’s the new symbol of our time. Of course, it’s like the Bachman, Turner, Overdrive song title, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.”
“Who?” Anna asked.
“Don’t blaspheme, girl,” Oliver replied.
They walked on. But for the wreckage in the street, it was a lovely late spring day filled with birdsong. Tall, gray slab walls bordered the road on both sides. They were built to shield suburban homes from traffic noise. Fanshawe Park Road was a major east-west conduit along the north end of the city, but now there were no cars or trucks barreling through. Except for the abandoned emergency vehicle, the street stood empty.
The sound barrier walls, normally a long expanse of gray concrete, had become a riot of paint. Anna paused to admire an artful copy of the Christ on the cross marred by several illegible gang symbols. Another graffito was scrawled at regular intervals: Stay out of the X! Beside that was scrawled in another hand: Beware the Wolves!
The writing was a complete mystery to Jaimie. He saw no words. The writing was not uniform enough in its cursive and italic loops and lines for him to decipher. Each writer’s intent and character was too varied for him to read. Where the others saw messages sprayed on the walls, he saw only abstract pictures, ciphers impossible to decode.
His sister, mother and neighbor could read the messages, however, and he could tell by their auras that their moods were plummeting the farther they walked along the wall.
Anna chewed her lip and held Jaimie’s hand tighter. Repent! read one message in day-glo green. Someone else had written over that in blood red: Lord have mercy! and a third tagger had written below that, Obviously, God don’t care.
A little further on stood several memorials. “Olivia, you were a good wife,” read one. That was in white and, unlike the others, written large to fill the height of the wall for several concrete panels. The tribute had been painted with a wide brush by a tall man.
Another simply read: Andrea. Why?
Another, more hopeful message told them: The Brickyard’s a safe refugee camp. Protected by good military. If you’re unarmed, you get in and get medical help.
Here and there, fading pictures of missing loved ones dotted the wall and fluttered in the breeze. A phone number was listed below a picture of a stunning redheaded woman wearing cat’s eye sunglasses. Heather Pritch, 29, separated at hospital. Came back for you. Will wait at train station. Tara.
The flyer, fixed to the wall with a scrap of twisted duct tape, looked like it would lose its tentative hold with the next breath of wind.
There were also a few with directions and warnings:
Todd, Meet Us At Deb’s, Love Beth.
Go around Chicago!
Detroit’s Burnt DOWN!
Army’s taken over Tahoe. They shoot all who approach.
Another read: Michigan has militia! but it wasn’t clear if that was a warning or a hopeful sign that somewhere there was order.
A more informative message read: Refugee Camps at NIAGRA FALLS has gone X. Many dead. Stay home and indoors. God bless.
Just before a gap in the wall ahead, a green winking ghoul admonished them with a pointing finger. ‘We want you!’ was scrawled over its grotesque head. Below a smeared wagging finger were the words: Not to Litter! Burn Your Evil Dead! It was signed, The Ungrateful Living.
At another spot, a column of numbers from one to 24 stood, each number exed out. The next number in the series jumped to 26. Beside the column were the words: Tally of Looters shot.
Jack and Anna and Oliver read each message with curiosity, growing more anxious with each step, but no one spoke.
The one that bothered Jack most was a large caricature in chalk, well-executed, of a smug-looking Edgar G. Robinson with a cigar stuck between thick lips. Jaimie recognized the face as an actor who played a gangster in movies his father loved.
The figure had a huge head atop a tiny body wearing a toga. It would have been comical except the words below it in neat purple sidewalk chalk read: Where’s your deliverer now, see? Where’s your deliverer now?!
Jack Spencer wanted to cry. Instead, she looked to the clear sky. She couldn’t look at the messages anymore. She forced a smile and surveyed the empty road to their right. “At least all those people who left got pretty far away. I was worried the road would be jammed.”
“The traffic snarls are farther south,” Oliver called over his shoulder. “I haven’t gone very far, but I did find a bicycle yesterday and got south as far as Oxford Street. The road is down to one narrow lane in some places but it was passable.”
“I wonder where all those people went?”
“I’m betting a bunch went up north. If you want to get away from people, you go to the trees. Lots of people own cottages, or know someone who owns one. And if you live in a tiny apartment, you didn’t have any room or money for building up a supply. They had to get out earlier, get somewhere where there was food. I’m sure a lot of ’em moved back in with their parents and hoped there were lots of cans of soup in the basement.”
“We were so lucky to have more warning about the Sutr virus,” Jack said. If not for her brother-in-law’s letter, the Spencers might have been like so many others and trusted that, whatever the challenge, the established system would grind on through trouble. As they watched people spend wildly as Sutr hit, the bankers must have thought they’d get rich off the disaster and be paid later. She wondered where those bankers were now that every city was devastated by Sutr. Could the survivors start over and get back to that happy, ignorant and arrogant place? At the time, the transition seemed slow. Now piles of bodies were be
ing burned — Jack assumed someone was still burning them, anyway. Funeral homes had been overwhelmed early, conceding they could handle no more only after their services were scheduled late into the night.
The truth was, everyone had had enough warning, but the signs were much easier to see in retrospect. It wasn’t just the growth of the Sutr virus on other continents before it spread here that should have been sufficient warning. It was the obvious incompetence of those in charge, no matter how well-intentioned.
Images of the World Trade Center attack swirled through her mind. The Bush administration had been warned about Osama bin Laden, but took no steps to protect their citizens before the attack. The FBI had received warnings from flight schools of weird behavior from pilot trainees. When dangers are that clear in hindsight, somebody should have had some foresight.
The horrors of Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and the devastation of New Orleans had delivered a strong message that was largely unheeded: when the human waste hits the ceiling fan, we’re all splattered.
Only Jaimie looked back at the twisted ladder truck. He wanted to go for a ride in one of those fire trucks. He hoped they’d find one that wasn’t damaged.
Broken fire trucks make everyone sad, he thought.
They came to a break in the wall. A large house stood back from the road to their left. It looked out of place, a ramshackle three-story surrounded by neighborhoods of single family dwellings. Some properties in the city’s north end occupied larger, irregular lots. This area had, not so long ago, been farmland on the city’s outskirts. Suburban sprawl swallowed these oversized properties. Most cornfields and orchards had been sold off to developers and divided up into a patchwork of tiny tracts for housing land. Subdivisions packed houses so tightly neighbors could hold hands across the space between the homes.
“Look at that,” Douglas Oliver said.
A screen door, ripped from its hinges, lay in the yard. The large, ornate front door stood ajar. Even from their vantage point on the sidewalk, it was clear the dark wood around the frame and the doorknob had been splintered white.
“Your boyfriend take up breaking and entering as a hobby you think?” Jack said.
“Mom!” Anna elbowed her mother in the ribs.
“Look closer,” the old man said. He pointed with his walking stick. Farther back on the circular driveway, a line of rats crossed the open ground from the hedge rimming the property, headed toward the house. Dozens ran across open ground in waves.
Anna’s hand, already so tight around his hand, squeezed even tighter and Jaimie pulled away to loosen her grip.
She looked his way and whispered “Sorry, Ears.”
He watched as an orange-yellow wave of revulsion moved up and down her spine. Anna shivered. “Gross!”
“Sutr isn’t our only problem,” Oliver said. He glanced at the others, “Looters, hunger, fire and packs of feral dogs and the current abominable lack of access to Downton Abbey…”
“Yeah, we got 99 problems,” Anna agreed.
“A good thick, steak would be nice, too,” Jack said.
“You’re thinking of more to worry about?” Anna couldn’t take her gaze off the rats.
“I was thinking what comes next,” Oliver said.
“Not all the dead are getting burned or buried. And nature is…well…nature. There are other, older plagues that tend to follow untended corpses.”
Yet another wave of rats followed their brothers and sisters toward the house.
They stood transfixed as another group of long brown rats scurried across the yard.
“They are the armies of the night,” Oliver said, “only it’s daylight and they are feeling bold.”
“All our food that isn’t in a can is stored in plastic,” Jack said.
“The fridge and freezer are empty and warm now, but maybe we should put the food in there as an added precaution, just so we don’t attract any vermin by the smell,” Anna suggested.
Oliver nodded. “And maybe we’ll scrounge up some rat traps or poison bait somewhere. At the mall, I’m hoping.”
“That’s something else that should have been on the list,” Jack said, “but I never would have thought of that in a million years. Should have thought of it. After 9/11, New York had rat traps everywhere. There was a burst in the rodent population with the increased food supply. First all the abandoned restaurants, then the rubble.”
“Mom! Enough!”
“I-I’m sorry,” Jack wiped her brow with her forearm. “I just should have thought these worst-case scenarios through. Everything’s so clear now.”
“I’m old,” Oliver said. “I understand. You get to a stage in life where you look backwards and you think it was pretty much inevitable that you’d wind up where you’re at.” He shrugged. “It’s always a surprise, anyway. It’s the curse of the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
“That’s how I feel right now,” Anna said, “like we’re all God’s unintended consequence.”
“You feel that way now,” her mother said, “but someday you’ll be telling your grandchildren about this trip to the mall. We’re all going to get through this and it’ll make a great story.”
“Moving on,” Anna said, taking the lead. She pulled Jaimie close to her side. “Disasters aren’t adventures when you’re in the middle of them,” she told her brother. “People add the romance to it later so they can rationalize away the crap-your-pants scared part.”
Two blocks behind them was home. Two blocks ahead was the mall.
“When I get to lie down tonight, I’m so tired, I don’t care if I wake up,” Oliver said.
“I want to go find Trent,” Anna said.
“And I just want to sit with my husband and nurse him back to health,” Jack added.
Jaimie longed for his big dictionary. He was curious to feel the sharp edges of the i and the soft black loops of the bs in the word bubonic. Bubonic was powerful. It smelled of a heavy organic rot that was sickly sweet, but the vowels felt gentle and pleasant as he formed the word in his mind.
They trudged on, ignoring the omens. They pushed their revulsion at the horrors of the wall away. They tried to forget the disgust and fear they felt at seeing hordes of greasy rats.
Each step felt like a bad investment they could not abandon. Each step felt heavier.
God's an absent father to a quiet son
The blackened mouth of the theater entrance showed there had been a fire. Empty spaces stood where glass doors had been shattered. It looked like a skull with empty eye sockets.
They thought they’d need flashlights, but there was enough light leaking through the skylights that the mall was cast in the weak slanted light of early evening.
“Shoulda come at noon,” Oliver said. “It’d be brighter.”
“Should have,” Anna said as she stepped through an empty door frame, pulling Jaimie behind her. “At noon the advantage is with the mortals. Less sunlight? Advantage: vampires.”
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda stayed home,” Jack said. “Let’s just get in and out quick. Oliver, you’ve got the bear spray. You go first, fearless leader.” Jack stepped in front of her children and pointed the old man toward the mall’s gloom.
Shattered glass, discarded merchandise and garbage formed the edges of a broad path through the corridors. Looting had been the aim of the first wave of invaders. As they made their way through the eerie quiet, it seemed thieves had turned to destruction.
“What do you think is left for us to steal?” Jack asked Oliver.
He shrugged. “Under these circumstances, it’s never stealing. We’re on a treasure hunt. Treasure doesn’t always look like treasure.”
The gloom deepened here and there where the skylights deserted them, but it was clear the jewellery store had been robbed clean. The gem cases were all smashed. The food court had also been sacked thoroughly.
“That’s a shame,” Anna said. “I could really go for a coconut smo
othie right about now. Or a latte.”
“I’m feeling hungry enough, some of those little plum sauce packets might do,” Jack added.
Far off, there came a sound on the edge of hearing. They all stopped, heads cocked, ears straining.
We’re like deer on the Discovery Channel, Jaimie thought, just before some animal with big fangs and claws runs them down.
They listened for a full minute before anyone broke the silence. “It’s the wind,” Oliver said.
Jack looked at him. “How do you figure that?”
“There must be a window broken somewhere, that’s all. It’s wind soughing through trees,” Oliver said.
Jack shook her head and turned to Anna. “Your ears are younger. What do you hear?”
“Angel song. It’s far off,” she said, shivering. “They’re singing a song of welcome.”
“Give me a break,” Oliver said.
“That’s what I hear.”
“Let’s just go a little bit farther in,” Oliver said. “It’s a big mall. There’s bound to be other explorers here.”
“Looters,” Anna said.
Oliver waved his walking stick, urging them to follow. “We’ll leave a grateful note.”
Glass crunched under their shoes. Twenty paces farther, they stopped and listened, hearing nothing. Then, just as they moved forward again, the sound came louder. Far off, someone sang a light tuneless song, like a harp plucked randomly, occasionally falling into running scales.
Jaimie’s pant’s leg caught a wire hanger which was hooked into other hangers. The discarded clothes hangers scraped together like metal strings, clattering. The echo bounced down the corridor. All went silent, as if now someone was listening for them. Jaimie was sorry the music had disappeared. It was beautiful and familiar.
Jack spotted a bookstore ahead and signalled for everyone to wait while she entered its dark mouth. She was a few feet in before she pulled a flashlight from her pocket. She wished she’d opted for the long, heavy Maglite with the line of batteries in it. It could be used as a club, but she hadn’t wanted to carry more weight than was necessary.
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