Everyone mulled the thought of God betting against them.
“Maybe it wasn’t really God at all,” Jack suggested.
“If The Way of Things isn’t really God,” Desi said, “I dearly wish the real deal had shown up to help us out early on.”
“We’re here,” Jack said, “so maybe He did.”
Dayo frowned. “God wrote a book packed with death and destruction. He’s not above it.”
“So…we won and the war’s over.” Cliff said.
“I think the war,” Desi said, “will be to stay on track. We lost our way. Whether we were meant to win or lose, this turned out to be quite the course correction. As I lay in the back of that truck in Charleston, I was so banged up I was afraid I’d die and scared I’d live. Then I heard the voice. ‘“The gap between what you were, and what you could be, is closed once more.’ It’s a second chance, isn’t it? I began to heal and I…no one was near me. I heard no other voices…no human voices…but in that moment…I guess you’d call it grace. I felt grace.”
Everyone nodded, but no one felt like celebrating.
* * *
As the first fingers of dawn reached West, Jack sat on a flat rock by the lighthouse watching the Atlantic. Aasa sat on her right, Aastha on her left.
Soon, twin suns met on the orange horizon, one low in the sky, the other reflected amid the waves and whitecaps.
“There’s always another war,” Jack said finally. “Every day is a war.”
“What war?” Aastha asked.
“Today. Today is the future. Like it or not, we’re all in it. I almost ran into the water with him last night.”
Aastha reached out and gripped Jack’s hand.
Jack gave a grateful smile. “The three most powerful words are: I love you. I’m so glad Jaimie and I could say those magic words to each other before…” She cleared her throat. “The two most powerful words are: begin again. That’s what we’ll do. That’s the war now, with every dawn.”
Aasa watched Jack Spencer watch the rising sun. “Do you think he made it? Back to The Last Cafe?”
Jack shrugged. “Stories don’t really end. Stories stop but the characters continue on. Wherever he is, I hope he’s not alone. I hope he’s with his dad. I hope to see them both again, someday, all in our heaven.”
“We’re all going to live a lot longer now,” Aasa said. “You’ll have to wait.”
“As long as it takes.”
Aasa hugged her. “Jaimie would say, ‘Nil desperandum.’”
“I know.” Never say die.
Aastha gave a troubled frown and Jack heard her question: What do you think the one most powerful word is?
Jack answered, “Together.”
* * *
Author’s Note
Despite being Theo’s twin, Cliff never replaced him in Jack’s heart. Cliff Spencer kept the farm in the Corners. He did learn carpentry. He tended goats and his father’s grave and brother’s grave.
Jack Spencer moved back West the following year to be with her daughter and her husband, Trent. Anna gave birth to a little girl. She named her Jasmine, but everyone called the baby Jaimie.
Every year on St. Patrick’s Day, the world celebrates the official end of the Sutr pandemic. Legend had it that St. Patrick drove all snakes out of Ireland and into the sea. Each March marks the anniversary of the last Sutr-Z zombie being driven into world’s oceans in a cast of color. Everyone can cast colors now.
Dr. Ellen Harper is still alive and she is still researching changes to our genetic code, trying to understand the mechanism of the human race’s longevity. Our telomeres aren’t so short anymore, but she suspects the source of our newfound health comes from a deeper, organizational energy. “DNA coding makes the wheels, but the energy beneath everything is the engine,” she says.
It has been 254 years since the end of the Sutr apocalypse. Some people still call it the zombie apocalypse because the victors write history and get to name things. I always point out that the zombies were never truly zombies and it was the humans who received supernatural powers, not the infected.
The Sutr-Zs were not monsters. They were sick. We all were in some way then.
I have never suffered a fever or a cold since Jaimie made his bargain. The world population is back up, sustained and sustainable at two billion minds. Shiva was right about that much. Birth control is all voluntary. People cooperate for the greater good now.
We speak less and less. As we practiced telepathy, we’ve gotten better at it and speech, among the young, is considered quaint. The scope and power of the hive mind has expanded around the planet and we still have world peace. In knowing each other’s minds and sharing both joy and suffering, our compassion is our strength. Together, we know there is no profit in the concepts that divide into us and them. There is only we.
People still ask me about The Way of Things every day. It’s true, I spoke with Dark Matter personally. But humbly, I have come to believe the power of our compassion for each other can be even greater than some remote entity.
It’s a mistake to assume The Way of Things is truly divine and right merely because It is so powerful. We often used to make that same mistake with powerful people. We don’t believe might makes right anymore.
It is people who know each other’s struggles best because we share common hopes and fears.
As for me, I am slowing down. I will solve the great mystery myself one day. I spend more hours with the babies lately, instructing their minds. Days are for non-fiction. The nights are for flights of delightful fantasy. In our dreams, we are always free.
I can tell you with certainty, The Way of Things watched us and took in our story (as, I suppose, It still does.) However, that is much different from the empathy gained from feeling all that humans experience.
Desi Walsh became my second father — yes, I did end up calling him “Daddy”, after all.
“Aadi will always be your da,” he told me, “but two’s better than one. No frets.”
Desi never became sheriff of a small town in the West. Genetic improvements and reading minds ended the need for Garda services. “Cracking skulls was scary. I prefer fishing and boating and Dayo, anyway,” he said, “not in that order.”
Reading has made a comeback. Dayo said that we connect with a painter through many tiny brush strokes. We understand the poet by the music they make in our heads and, when music moves us, we feel the singer’s presence in our souls.
“But a book plays with our minds, as dreams do,” she said. “To quote my favorite potato face, that’s a fret. To understand His creation better, God played with us,” she said. “I hope It got something out of our suffering. The Way of Things moved the universe and wrote us into a script full of chaos, just to see what It thought and what we’d do.”
Dayo, my dear second mother, was among the most compassionate women I’ve ever known, but she could never forgive The Way of Things that.
“Jaimie’s grand bargain,” she said, “should never have been necessary. My compassion is reserved for people, not remote powers who see us as pawns for a cosmic game of chess.”
I didn’t know what I could tell her to lessen her pain. I still don’t have that answer.
Youngsters come to me and ask the same questions, more questions than I have answers to. They ask me what the purpose of the great Sutr Purge really was. I point at the night sky and ask them to turn their minds to the stars. We travel the earth with our minds. I think if we concentrate our energies beyond ourselves, we will soon reach much farther.
The young ones now born will live even longer. With so many tomorrows, they will unlock the divisions of time and space. Mankind spent a lot of energy trying to bridge great distances with machines. We’re wiser now. We’ll bridge the stellar gap by going in, not out. I tell them, as Virgil said, “‘Sic itur ad astra.’ Thus you shall go to the stars.”
Then the children want the story again. I won’t be around forever, so I wrote this history, alon
g with my dear little sister, who has a knack for asking excellent questions. Aastha has been invaluable in reviving my memories of those dark days when I witnessed everything, forward and back, plugged into The Way of Things.
Mostly, the children ask how things are different now. I recite the inscription on the stone at the Gateway to the Spirit World, where many still visit each year. The inscription in the Corners reads: Foolishness weakened us. Hatred divided us. Fear united us. When we gather in Compassion and know it to be our greatest power, we live.
“Greed and jealousy and punishment? Those strategies didn’t work,” I tell the children. “Love works. I’m embarrassed to say we tried everything else first.”
The adults ask about Jaimie. I will not eulogize him for what he did. He was too complex for a perfunctory, graveside summation, so let this long book serve that purpose. To me, he is still alive, or alive again.
You see, sometimes I see Jaimie Spencer in my dreams, never a day older than the night he abdicated the blood throne and walked into Poeticule Bay. I’ll leave it to each reader to decide for themselves what awaits through the gateway.
It might be an old woman’s wishful thinking (I hope not) but I have decided for myself. Some nights I awake with an image so clear and believable, I have to wonder if it’s Jaimie reaching out to me and not the other way around. Everything seems so real in sleep, of course, but I see him through the haze at the end of the dream. Jaimie reads the book you’re holding now. He sits by the fire in the wood stove as snow falls behind him, gentle and soft and quiet. He turns the pages, at home and at peace. He looks up and smiles. He looks me in the eye when he does so.
On a small table nearby sits a steaming mug of hot chocolate. There is more than one mug on the table, slowly cooling, ready and waiting for more guests, friends and family in the beautiful library called The Last Cafe.
~ Aasa Elizabeth Vermer
2,285 Anno Domini
EXCLUSIVE GIFT TO OMNIBUS READERS
You’ll discover more books by Robert Chazz Chute on the next page, but before you go, this is the exclusive offer to readers who purchased the TPOD OMNIBUS EDITION in 2014. Go to this private video link on Youtube: http://bit.ly/TPODprivatelinkforyou
If you comment on the video answering the question I pose at that link, I’ll send you a free ebook through Amazon. Sorry I can’t let it go on forever, but please follow the instructions and contact me at the email provided in the video in 2014.
I’ll send you my new thriller as my thank you gift to you for purchasing the TPOD OMNIBUS EDITION.
Thank you so much and much love!
~ Chazz
To Discover More
This is the end of This Plague of Days, OMNIBUS EDITION.
Thank you for reading and allowing me to play in your mind.
Meet me in one of the Mindfields below.
~ RCC
About the Author
After several years working in the publishing industry, Robert Chazz Chute took a long hiatus before founding Ex Parte Press. He has a degree in journalism and is a podcaster, former magazine columnist and features writer. He is a graduate of the Banff Publishing Workshop and has won seven writing awards. Season One of This Plague of Days became an Amazon bestseller in September, 2013. Season Two hit the bestseller lists as soon as it was released.
Coming soon by Robert Chazz Chute in Summer 2014:
Intense Violence, Bizarre Themes ~ In this quirky fast-paced crime novel, our hero returns home to New York, the prodigal son to a father who doesn’t know him anymore. If you liked Bigger Than Jesus (or The Big Lebowski), you’ll love this funny, thrilling story about missing gems, missing persons and missing out.
Discover other titles by Robert Chazz Chute:
This Plague of Days, Season One
This Plague of Days, Season Two
This Plague of Days, Season Three
Bigger Than Jesus
Higher Than Jesus
Self-help for Stoners
Murders Among Dead Trees
Crack the Indie Author Code
Write Your Book: Aspire to Inspire
Six Seconds
The Little Book of Braingasms
For more on This Plague of Days, check out:
ThisPlagueOfDays.com
For more information about the books:
www.AllThatChazz.com
For more information about the Cool People Podcast visit:
www.CoolPeoplePodcast.com
Fellow writers may also enjoy Chazz’s writing blog:
www.ChazzWrites.com
For media requests, requests for speaking engagements and podcast ad spots, please email:
[email protected]
Table of Contents
License Notes?
1?
Season 1, Episode 1?
Here We Sit in The Last Cafe?
Invisible, whimsical and losing our way?
Toast Fortune's smiles and fever dreams?
Of lost loves and butter creams?
Tonight we dream of claws and teeth?
Tomorrow's for promises we'll fail to keep?
We are all gods in some small way?
But Chaos rules The Last Cafe?
Season 1, Episode 2?
Here we sit in The Cafe of Despair?
God doesn't mind dirty tables and broken chairs?
At the end of the world and miles away?
No wine, no roses, no time to play?
Mourning what we had?
Roast together: Ugly, Good and Bad?
Pay the Piper's Cost?
Remember all you've lost?
These are the lessons of Despair's Cafe?
Pray all you want in our final days?
An army rises and the dead will have their way.?
Season 1, Episode 3?
Zombies are the New World Disorder?
Making history and the future poorer?
Let go of what you know?
Secrets hide where ghosts go?
The chain of food is upside down?
Now rabid wolves wear the crown?
Human jaws become monsters' maws?
The Ungrateful Living face new laws?
Return to the beginning, man to animal?
Human sacrifice and bloody ritual?
The virus spreads, making evil minds?
Big Brother lies and denies?
But The Zombie Queen claims her prize.?
Season 1, Episode 4?
Run fast from the zombie horde?
Pack your memories, grab a sword?
When they come for us, hungry and red?
Don't bother hiding under the bed?
God's an absent father to a quiet son?
Nowhere to hide, few places to run?
Zombified, carrier or in the ground??
Wolves howl louder when food's around?
Take your reward for the struggle of life?
Death by disease or salvation by the knife??
Season 1, Episode 5?
Here we sit in Death's Cafe?
We are the zombie's reluctant buffet?
The deepest wounds are those unseen?
Between what we were and where we've been?
Be killed or kill in days like these?
Pray for God's mercy or the Red Queen's disease?
Say farewell to your comfortable home?
Goodbye to tea, clotted cream and scones?
The fruit of war, the wages of sin?
You don't yet know what it will take to win?
Or even half of the trouble we're in?
Save your strength for the fight?
Use your rage. Defy the night.?
2?
Season 2, Episode 1?
Miles away in the Last Cafe?
We count every cost, each rueful day?
But knowing will not lessen the surprise?
When you see the truth beneath the
guise?
The puzzle is not Death, but Life neverlasting?
The answer is under the stars and moon shadows casting?
Light, revelation, and fearful truth?
The stuff of old age and disappointed youth?
In dreams we find the connection to what will last?
What won’t survive and what’s best left in the past?
Season 2, Episode 2?
Adam is the first of the worst?
As the Red Queen rises?
Small heroes fall while villains gain bloody prizes?
Wraiths and ravens stalk the dead?
You might have lived, had you fled?
Creatures of old return with a vengeance?
Same appetites, plus dangerous sentience?
Persuasive street preachers’ eyes shine?
With truth, crocodile tears or persuasive lies??
It’s a fight to devolve from monster to man?
So few enter that battle, very few can.?
Season 2, Episode 3?
Ploys and traps, poisons and scandals?
Death and disease, mires and mangles?
Today’s solutions are tomorrow’s tangles?
The webs we weave are deceits we can’t handle?
The clues are there for the very aware?
Grim fun is found between the scares?
We are all bound for the ghost parade?
This Plague of Days OMNIBUS EDITION: The Complete Three Seasons of the Zombie Apocalypse Series Page 94