“What do you girls know about starfish?” Dayo asked.
Aastha poked the air with her index finger, counting. “They have five arms. And they’re weird. That doesn’t look like a fish at all!”
Dayo smiled. “That’s right. Did you know if they lose an arm, they’ll grow it back?”
“Yes,” Aasa said. “That would have been useful if it was the way we were made in the first place.”
Dayo didn’t like the look on the girl’s face. She seemed haunted.
“What did the messenger tell you, Aasa?”
“He asked me to talk to you about this. The starfish, but not the fish.”
“What?”
“From a long time ago. He was sure you’d know.”
Dayo stared at the girl, perplexed. Then, a small nod. “Starfish, but not the fish…there is…there is one thing. When I moved to London, they taught us something in school that has always stuck with me. During the Blitz — ”
The girls’ blank stares told Dayo she’d already lost them. She began again. “In World War II, German planes bombed England. The British came up with a brilliant idea. They put up mock towns and cities out in the country, a few miles from the real targets. They tried to get the bombers to attack the fake cities instead of the real ones.”
Aastha wrinkled her nose. “The pilots couldn’t tell the difference between a real city and a fake one?”
“Not at night, and they lit the fake targets with light boxes and explosions and fires so it looked like they’d already been hit by the bombs. With all the smoke and fire, I suppose the pilots went by sight instead of trusting their navigation. Maybe the smoke obscured the target enough…hm, I don’t really remember the details. Just that it was a decoy that saved lives. The bombers often dropped bombs where they were harmless.”
“What does that have to do with starfish?” Aastha asked.
“That’s what the decoys were called. Starfish.”
Dayo looked around. “If this is to be the battlefield, who’s coming to the fight?” She turned to look back on Poeticule Bay. The abandoned lighthouse looked shabby and in disrepair. All the glass was broken out of the windows and the generator that powered the light had run dry. However, the high deck would make an excellent observation platform.
“Gallery,” Aasa said.
Dayo looked down. The girl had somehow sensed her thoughts. Dayo searched Aasa’s face, but the communication either didn’t work in both directions or the connection had been a mere flash of bright insight, now gone dark. “I beg your pardon?”
“Jaimie says the walk around the lighthouse light, high up? It’s called a gallery. That’s where we should be when the battle happens.”
“Okay…what else?”
“We have to get the light working. We have to get a lot of gas.”
“Where are we going to get a lot of gas, for God’s sake?”
“Don’t worry. Xavier and Dahlia are bringing that. They found two big tanker trucks. They’re coming.”
“Who are they?”
“Recruits.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“The battle will happen at night under the full moon, when the tide is all the way out.”
“I think the moon is full in a day or two.”
Aasa nodded and turned to the Atlantic. “Out under the water, over there, is a black rock with a flat top. Jaimie is supposed to wait for the monster there.”
“What then?”
“The monster’s a little sick now, but he’s still strong and even more dangerous. He’s going to try to make Jaimie a monster, too. The monster wants to make a new tribe. The monster will be the king and Jaimie will be a prince…or die.”
“What’s Jaimie’s plan?”
Aasa grimaced. “He’ll try not to become a monster.”
“Right. Okay. Good.”
Their plans were interrupted by screams. Aastha had wandered away. The little girl was only a hundred feet away, but a vast mob was coming up the shore toward Poeticule Bay. The Sutr-Z infected had arrived.
“Zombies!” Dayo yelled. She shouldn’t have. They came at a shambling gait, but upped their pace at the sound of her terrified shout.
Dayo began running for the little girl, but tidal pools dotted the uneven ground. She leapt from loose rock to loose rock, fell, got up, fell again.
“Aastha! Come back to me! Run!”
But the little girl was frozen in fear. The infected were thin and weak, but they were close.
Dayo slipped on seaweed and went down again, this time scraping her bare arm raw, peeling skin from wrist to shoulder.
The zombies sensed the blood, or maybe it was her terror and pain that pulled them forward faster. Dayo could hear them snarling. The creatures, pathetic and torn, were more like rabid animals than the humans they’d once been. Old blood stained their ragged clothes. They were obviously intent on spilling new blood. They didn’t seem to have the strength to run, but they were hurrying across the shore, through the tidal pools. They focused on the child.
Dayo got up, ignoring the pain burning down her wrenched shoulder. She leaped to a high rock. What she saw made her legs weak. She’d thought the Sutr-Zs were a mob. From her new angle, she saw that their number stretched down the shore in a long, jagged column. There were hundreds. Perhaps more.
Dayo called to Aastha again in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “It’ll be okay if you run now. Please, Aastha!” Tears glistened on Dayo’s cheeks. “Please! Run to me now!”
But the little girl did not move and Dayo was sure Aastha was going to die horribly. She’d failed her adopted daughter and the Vermer girls’ dead father.
“No! No! No!” Dayo cursed. She didn’t want to see what was about to happen. If the infected got little Aastha, Dayo promised herself she would not look.
I’m sorry, Aadi, she thought. I have to run and try to save Aasa now. If I don’t run now, I’ll lose both your children to the dark. I’m so sorry!
“Bokor says stop!” It was Aasa, standing on a high rock surrounded by water. The seven-year-old had swum through cold water to climb to its jagged tip. She stood shivering atop it in bare feet. Arms outstretched, Aasa looked to Dayo like Moses, if Moses had been reincarnated as a tiny Indian girl.
The zombie column halted just short of Aastha. Picking up a heavy, smooth stone as she went, Dayo stole forward to snatch up the little girl.
The infected at the front of the group snarled and several stepped closer. Aasa’s control over the horde was too loose a grip. Dayo could sense their fury. Desperate and in pain, hunger pangs could drive the most loyal dog to eat its master. Sutr-Z had made these people cannibals and they had no more discipline than bad dogs.
As Dayo took Aastha in her arms, the child trembled. Dayo began to walk backwards, slowly. More of the lead zombies advanced, ignoring Aasa’s command and closing the distance.
Aasa held both hands high. She wasn’t even looking at her sister, or Dayo or the approaching zombie horde. She turned toward the ocean.
Slack-jawed, Dayo tore her gaze from the snarling creatures before her. From the corner of her eye, she’d caught a glimpse of a flash of light. She felt something through her chest, like the thrum of a bass beat from a powerful speaker.
Aasa let out a feral scream, “Now!”
A whale spout broke the ocean surface. Then another and another.
“Now! Now! Now!” Aasa’s voice was not that of a terrified little girl. It was a jubilant command, a rallying cry and a fierce hope.
Dayo broke into a run toward Aasa and a dozen or more zombies, growling and screaming in outrage, left the group to give chase.
Aastha screamed in Dayo’s ear as she ran among the tidal pools. Zombies splashed behind her, close and quick, burning the last of their energy, desperate to feed.
A blue whale, nearly a hundred feet long and close to two-hundred tons, launched itself high in the air and crashed against the rocks. One of the largest mammals ever kn
own to exist narrowly missed Dayo and Aastha. It fell to the rocks, obliterating four of the zombies in one crushing blow.
Quaking and pulling Aastha along with her on her back, Dayo swam out to the rock where Aasa stood. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Dayo yelled.
Aasa turned and regarded Dayo with serious eyes. “No.”
“What?”
When Aasa spoke, she sounded like a grown woman. She spoke as if she were a child miscast in a bizarre play, repeating lines meant for a wise and resolute adult. “Our forces are weak from their long march,” she said. “They will feed. Soon they’ll be strong again.”
Dayo looked down the shore. More whales had beached themselves. “Oh. Oh my god!”
“We have a lot to do before tomorrow night.”
Dayo hugged Aastha tight. They both cried.
“C’mon,” Aasa said. “The infected have plenty to eat. They’ll leave us alone until we’re ready. They’ll follow orders better once they have a good feeding.”
“Aasa?” Dayo asked. “Do…do the whales…um…do the whales understand what’s going on?”
“They’re another part of The Way of Things…like us…like a part of a machine,” Aasa said.
“Okay, but do they understand that they’ve sacrificed themselves for us?”
Aasa rolled her eyes. “I doubt it. Crikey! Are you mad? They’re just whales.”
Aastha had a better question. “What does the machine make?”
Aasa allowed a small smile. She hadn't known the answer until the right question was asked. “Crazy stories, Aastha. The machine makes crazy stories.”
New stories and ancient myths
The Spencers gave in to their hunger and pulled off the Trans-Canada on the West side of a long bridge that spanned a wide river. They ate from a small bottle of peach jam at a tiny Tim Hortons restaurant.
The donut shop did not have donuts or coffee anymore, of course, but they brushed some broken glass off a table and placed a map of the road ahead atop it. They studied the map and, jam in the middle, passed a single, plastic spoon among them.
The Tim Hortons was perched on the side of a steep hill overlooking a river valley. Chilling early morning air crept over them through the window frame’s empty eyes. The family watched snowy fog melt to reveal the depth of the valley and a long, dark structure that spanned the river.
“I know this place. That’s the longest covered wooden bridge in the world,” Jack said. “This is Hartland.”
Anna looked up sharply. “Jaimie’s usually the one with the surprising yet totally useless factoids.”
“I’ve been here before, when I was a kid about your age, Anna,” Jack said.
“A kid my age isn’t a kid, Mom.” Anna held out the plastic spoon to her mother but pulled it back when her mother reached for it. “Right?”
After a long look, Jack nodded that was so. “You’re all grown up.” Jack scooped some congealed yellow jam into her mouth and made a face at its overly sweet acidity.
Jaimie took the spoon from his mother eagerly and kept spooning the stuff into his mouth until Anna stopped him and swiped the utensil from his hand.
“Why were you here, Mom?”
Jack shrugged. “Penance in the form of a family road trip. I went to a wedding in Woodstock, New Brunswick with my parents.”
“Woodstock! Stock of wood!” Jaimie said.
Jack looked annoyed. “When you have something to say about appearing in strangers’ dreams, let me know, Jaimie.
“Anyway, after the wedding, we drove on to Quebec City. Dad was working for the power company by then and finally had three weeks off in a row for the first time. I lobbied for Orlando but they said that cost too much.”
“You told us going to Orlando cost too much,” Anna said.
“Expensive trip on a librarian’s budget.”
“Ouch,” Theo said.
“So you became Grammy and Grampy, those awful parents you were just slamming?” Anna smiled.
“Watch out. You’ll become me, too. Every daughter becomes her mother. Every son becomes his father. There’s no escape.”
“I will be careful of that,” Anna deadpanned. Jack broke into a laugh and Anna joined her.
“You’re laughing at me,” Jack told Anna, “but that’s only because you don’t believe it. Someday you’ll say something nasty to your kids and think you sound just like me. That realization is its own little horror.”
“I can take little horrors,” Anna replied. “But I do wish we’d made it to Disney.”
Jaimie bounced in his seat, excited.
“Uh, oh.” Theo said. “I recognize that look.”
Jaimie began singing the theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club.
“Oh, crap,” Jack said. “You used the D-word.”
Jaimie had never visited Disney World, but he had seen the commercials when he was very young and was instantly entranced.
“What is it about a large rodent dressed in bright colors that makes kids so happy?” Theo asked.
Jaimie went through the song, then began again. The theme from The Mickey Mouse Club was the most Jaimie had uttered at once. It was cute and hopeful when he was five, but he might go on for an hour before lapsing back into deep, autistic silence.
“I should never have taught him that song,” Theo said.
“Your father taught Jaimie that song because it was the only way he knew to get him to string so many words together,” Jack told Anna. “It started off so therapeutic. Then Jaimie beat us to death with it.”
“When exactly was this awful road trip that did not take you to….D-word?” Anna asked, raising her voice to be heard above Jaimie’s third round of spelling out Mickey Mouse.
“It was the summer before I met your father.”
“You stopped here?”
“No, we came across the bridge from the other side, down there.” She pointed at the covered bridge. Its route circled back to the big highway above them.
“It was my last road trip with my parents. If I’d known they’d both be gone from a heart attack and a car crash before I graduated university…well, no. The road trip still would have been awful. Between carsickness and my parents’ bickering, I couldn’t wait to escape to the freedom of my own dorm room that September.”
“Still better than this road trip,” Anna said.
“Well, yeah. Marginally. We did have fewer dead bodies laying around then.”
Jaimie finished his song by shaking his hands in the air.
“Kid never forgets a thing,” Theo said. “I taught him ‘jazz hands’!”
“Why couldn’t it have been The Beatles? He has sung Oblah-di, Oblah-da,” Jack said.
“Yeah, but mostly the title, not the verses,” Anna corrected her. “Never mind, Mom. Ears would have ruined The Beatles for you. After nine-hundred times, no matter how good the song, it’s like we’re trapped in the down elevator to Hell with the devil’s muzak warbling for eternity.”
“Anna,” Jack said. “Sometimes I wonder if I contributed any genes at all.”
Theo smiled.
“Don’t say that, Mom. I got Dad’s sense of humor and your…uh…”
“Yes?”
“Stubbornness?” Anna asked. “We haven’t always gotten along so great, but that’s not because we’re so different. It’s because we’re so alike. We’re she-wolves in a small kennel, that’s all.”
“You know that every time I’ve yelled at you, it’s because I’m terrified for you and I’m just trying to stop you from mistakes that will hurt, right?” Jack asked.
“Everybody has to make their own mistakes,” Anna said. “And lots of mistakes turn out not to be mistakes. I was an accident. I know that.”
Jack’s jaw dropped. “Your Dad told you, didn’t he?”
“No,” Anna said. “You did. Just now. I always suspected. You skipped a year of university before you went back to finish your degree.”
/> Jack put down the jam, stood and gave Anna an awkward hug across the small table. She held her daughter a long time, dreading the moment she’d have to let her go. “Never a regret. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“I’m so scared for you, Anna. I can’t tell you how scared I am.”
“I’m not afraid,” Anna said. “Not anymore. Sometimes I’m really angry or sad, but I’m all out of scared. No more in stock.”
Jack kissed her daughter’s cheek. “I just want to spare you the pain mistakes make.”
“Don’t do that. That’s like trying to cure me of life.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and sniffling.
“Don’t worry,” Anna said. “I’m tougher than I look.”
“Yes. You sure are tougher than me.”
Anna’s eyes filled with tears. “Do you really mean that?”
“I do.”
Anna looked to Jaimie and, to her surprise, her brother gazed back and smiled.
Tell her.
She heard him in her mind as clearly as if he’d spoken.
Anna shook her head but her mother had heard, too. “Tell her what?” Jack asked.
“Don’t kill me.”
“Uh-oh…”
“Don’t be mad.”
“What is it about that request that always throws me into a murderous rage?”
“Mom…I…Trent and I — ”
“You’re pregnant.”
“It was an accident.”
“Of course, it was.” There was not a hint of surprise in Jack’s voice.
“How long have you known?”
“I don’t know. There are these sporadic inklings we get. I’ve known for a while. Your breasts look bigger to me. That was my first clue.”
“Mom!”
“On the road…on the long walk. I’ve known since then.”
“No wonder you were so pissy.”
“I figured you’d tell me when you were ready or went into labor. Whichever came first.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“No. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I had a speech prepared and everything but…life affirms life. We need that now. This isn’t a great time to have a baby, but…when your father and I had you, I thought it was a mistake. It was an accident, but it wasn’t a mistake.”
This Plague of Days OMNIBUS EDITION: The Complete Three Seasons of the Zombie Apocalypse Series Page 86