by Hamlyn, Jack
“Must’ve had some kind of mechanical problem,” Luke said, snowflakes powdering his face. “Maybe the driver was sick and wandered off. Maybe.”
Alger looked unconvinced. “Sure. That must be it.”
They got back in the pickup and drove over to 13th. Stepping out into the gathering storm, they just stood there, wordlessly, in the blowing snow. Luke looked tense and Alger looked positively haunted.
“I’m going to lock my door when I get home,” Alger said. “And I’m not going to open for anyone. You hear a knock at your door tonight, Luke, by God, you better not answer it.”
12
He hadn’t been to work in weeks by that point and he didn’t suppose he’d ever go back. Just for the hell of it—and maybe out of the need to hear another human voice—he called the garage and Stubby was there. Stubby was the Public Works super and he told Luke that less men showed up every day and if they got a good blizzard, he didn’t know how he was going to handle it. Only Johnny K. and Milt Penney had been showing up regularly. Tiny Christiansen called in two weeks before and hadn’t been heard from since. Even old Ronny Hazek who’d been tailgunning on the back of the honeywagon for forty years—dumping trash cans into the hopper with the zeal of a twenty year old—hadn’t been in for three days. Garbage was piling up. Side streets were unplowed. There were entire neighborhoods without water.
“Things are going straight to hell, Luke. Ain’t shit we can do but wait and see if it blows over.”
Sure.
Luke knew better. Things were at crisis stage. Even if the plague stopped tomorrow, the country would never be the same. It would be so depopulated that it would take years and years to get things moving again.
The economy was crashing on all fronts. People were dying, people were sick, others too frightened to leave their homes. Factories, mills, restaurants, saloons, and malls were empty. Nobody was producing and nobody was buying. Small towns were drying up, cities desolate. Banks closing their doors along with state and federal office buildings. There was nowhere to turn. The infrastructure of the country and the world at large had gone belly-up.
It really took something like this to illustrate just how weak and fragile was a country dependent upon a free market economy. When the money went, so did everything else—goods, services, employment, management of resources and people…all of it went into the shitter.
They were at the outer edge now, Luke knew, the very outer edge of what a government could hope to absorb before complete collapse ensued. Then it would be survival of the fittest.
How long, he wondered, before the electricity went out?
Until the TV and radio stations went off the air and the Internet crashed for good?
Until the Army dissolved into armed bands?
Until the stockpiles of medicine and food dried up and armed assholes were raiding in the streets taking what they wanted by force?
It was coming, he knew, oh God yes, it was coming.
13
One evening he took a ride to grab a few things at the store before there was nothing left. He was amazed at how desolate Wakefield was. By day, it was practically a ghost town, but by night…an absolute graveyard. He saw a police car and a tow truck, but that was about it. It was a cold night, but there should have been someone out walking a dog or something. There were 5,000 people in town and they couldn’t all be infected…or could they? Almost everything was closed. A few bars were open, but even their neon and Pabst Blue Ribbon signs had only snagged a few customers judging by the vehicles parked out front.
After he grabbed what he could at the A & P (which was mostly canned goods and boxed dinners, being that the fresh food just wasn’t coming anymore), he stowed his stuff in the bed of the truck and had just jumped behind the wheel when he saw them: a group of eight or ten people whose number quickly swelled to thirty if not forty like metal filings drawn to a central magnet. Maybe it was that or the maybe the infected had some psychic shortwave—come one, come all, it is the time of the dance.
Regardless, they came.
The first group was about what he’d come to expect in that it looked like when the hysteria got them they’d been in bed. Some were naked, half-naked, others in pajamas and robes. Kids, women, men, it took them all. Unless you actually saw it firsthand it was almost impossible to imagine a group of these unfortunates pouring into the streets in the December snow and biting wind and doing their dance.
As he sat there, they jumped and whirled, turning circles and thrashing on the ground. Some of them looked like they were practicing some crude free-form ballet or interpretative dance because they moved with very studied, repetitious movements; others were just wild and screeching, tearing out their hair and scratching their faces until they bled.
There was no music.
Nothing but the wind, the cold, a few snow flurries, and a sliver of pale yellow moon rafting the clouds high above.
Luke was pretty much trapped because there was no way he could get out without backing over one or more of them and he did not trust them not to throw themselves under his wheels. So he locked his doors and waited it out. They danced around the truck, oblivious to his presence—faces pallid and scratched, steaming with hot fever-sweat, eyes huge and wet. They spun about, falling down, getting up or getting crushed beneath the other dancers. They held hands and danced across the street like some insane conga line. If it hadn’t been so horrifying and insane, he supposed it might have been almost funny.
But it wasn’t funny.
They were bumping into the truck and slapping their faces against the windows. They all had the same shoebutton doll eyes with horribly dilated pupils like they were tripping their brains out on some real nasty shit.
They were not truly dangerous to anyone but themselves (outside of the plague burning hot and communicable within them), but scary all the same. Their faces—so mindless, so empty…like what they had once been was gone or retreating fast and they were waiting for something else to fill up the void.
Within ten or fifteen minutes, they were all down in the snow, shaking and chattering their teeth, puffing out big white clouds of vapor.
Then the soldiers showed.
They must have been waiting.
A couple trucks rolled down the street and out came the collectors in their gore-streaked Hazmat suits. Like alien invaders harvesting human crops, they came charging out of the shadows and picked up the fallen and started throwing them in the back of the trucks…right on top of the others.
Luke jumped out and grabbed one of the soldiers. “Hey! These people aren’t dead!”
He got shoved aside and two more troopers charged over, putting their M-4 rifles right in his face.
“Wait a minute now,” Luke said, putting his hands up. “I was just saying that—”
“We heard what you were saying. Now move along. These bodies are contaminated.”
“But they’re not dead…look, for chrissake! They’re breathing! They’re moving!”
A rifle barrel was planted dead center of his chest. “On your way! You don’t get the fuck out of here, you’re going in the truck with them!”
Luke started backing off. There was nothing he could do. He knew these guys weren’t getting any kicks out of the job they were doing. As usual, it was the soldiers and the cops who had to clean up the mess. Nobody was going to be exactly sane after spending all day tossing corpses into trucks and dumping them into burning pits, but those people were still alive. But it was beyond him to help them.
When the others moved off, one of the soldiers came over. “These bodies have to be burned,” he said. Even through the gas mask Luke could hear the voice of a kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, whose world had not only been turned upside down and inside out, but had become some Medieval nightmare of plague pits and mass graves. An eighteen or nineteen year old voice fractured by stress and fragmented with horror. It was like listening to a dying old man trying to mock the voice of his seventeenth summer: “I�
�m sorry, mister, I really am. But they have to be burned right away. We can’t wait. Tomorrow night, the night after…they’ll…they’ll…”
“They’ll what?”
“You don’t wanna know. Just move along, okay?” he said, trying hard to muster some sympathy, some humanity. “These guys aren’t fucking around. Their own families have been going into the pits…please just get out of here.”
So Luke got in his truck and drove off and the way those masked soldiers had been watching him, he was surprised they let him go at all.
14
In his notebook, he wrote:
All the schools in Wakefield have been closed for three weeks. Most of the state and government offices are shut down. People are afraid to gather together anywhere. They don’t even go to the mall to shop or to the bars to drink. Very few people even go to church on Sundays, from what I’ve been hearing. Things are breaking down on every conceivable level.
I have a healthy fear of the infected ones, of course, and particularly of their eerie dance of death in the streets. But what really worries me is the disintegration of society itself, of law and order. People are getting very desperate. And in Wakefield (like most of Wisconsin) just about everyone has a gun or easy access to one. It’s only a matter of time before things got out of hand.
My sister Peggy called from Milwaukee. She wanted to know how Sonja and Megan were doing. I told her the truth. Peggy said it was an absolute nightmare in Milwaukee. Martial law. The Army is patrolling the streets wearing biohazard gear, putting down riots by force and arresting anyone for the slightest infraction. Even gathering on the sidewalk in groups is illegal. Soldiers are breaking down doors, collecting the dead and arresting anyone who stands in their way. More than a few have been gunned down when they interfere. The bodies are taken outside the city to be disposed of. She claims there are huge pits where they are being cremated and you can see the trails of smoke in the sky day and night.
I told her it’s pretty much the same in Wakefield.
It’s pretty much the same all over.
She sent me a link to a YouTube Video that was pretty shocking. Apparently some college kids were out at night with a telephoto video camera and they filmed soldiers in white Hazmat suits tossing bodies into burning pits. With Sonja and Megan slipping away, it was the last thing I wanted to be looking at. But I have this godawful feeling that I’ll be seeing it again and a little closer to home.
15
While Megan slept, Luke sat with his wife and held her hand. Her temperature was elevated, but her hand was cool to the touch. Very smooth, unpleasantly clammy. He was shocked at how thin she had become, how the blood no longer touched her face but sought lower depths, leaving her skin with the pallor of the grave. She was pining away by the day and he was helpless to do anything about it. When she breathed, her chest trembled like a paper lantern. For about twenty minutes, she was awake, looking up at him with pale blue eyes and speaking a lot of gibberish about the fever dreams she’d been having. He got some beef broth into her and she held it down. That was all he could do for her and it made him hurt inside.
He drew the shades to keep the afternoon light out. As the disease progressed, Sonja had become increasingly sensitive to light. He noticed it with Megan, too. A shaft of direct sunlight would make them squirm as if it were burning them.
This suggested things he refused to think about.
Though it made little sense, he was noticing that day by day there were more flies on the windows. It was strange in December. Sometimes bright sunshine streaming through the windows would waken a few and they’d crawl about, stupid from the cold. But not this many. He was killing dozens of them every day.
And what in Christ was that about?
Sonja was lucid for a few moments and all she cared about was Megan. “Is she better, Luke?” she asked in that frail, delicate voice that sounded like it might shatter at any moment. “Tell me she’s doing better. Tell me my baby is all right.”
She was practically begging him to lie to her. It broke his heart even though it was already in pieces. Sighing, he told her Megan was doing a bit better and it looked promising. Sonja smiled and closed her eyes. She knew it was a lie, but it gave her peace. Sometimes the truth cuts and wounds, but a nicely packaged lie can give comfort. It’s something you can wrap yourself in and sleep in warmth.
Luke knew that Sonja didn’t give a damn about herself; all she cared about was Megan. She would have given her life without hesitation to keep Megan safe…just as he himself would have sacrificed his life in a second to save them both.
He was losing his family and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it. And the knowledge of that and the acceptance of it were like razor blades in his belly, cutting deeper by the day and forever hurting.
16
On December 10th, the Midwest got socked by the first real blizzard of the year. In Wakefield, it came down heavy and wet at first light as if it couldn’t make up its mind between freezing rain and snow. By eight a.m., there were six inches on the ground and well over a foot by noon. Luke pulled Sonja’s rocking chair up in front of the picture window and just watched it come down until the world was frosted white, the streets drifted over. Now and again he could hear a snowplow in the distance, but it never got anywhere near 13th Street.
Megan and Sonja were no better, much worse in fact. He knew what was coming. He’d been steeling himself to it for weeks, but that did not make it easier or remotely palatable. His entire world was hovering on the brink of the grave and he was just waiting for it to get shoved in all the way.
Sonja had not woken up in two days.
His daughter was barely breathing.
He was exposed to them physically hour after hour every day, washing away their blood and vomit. He breathed the same air, exposing himself—purposefully, he was beginning to think—and never wore the surgical gloves and mask the hospital had supplied him with and yet the germ was not touching him.
Some might have thought themselves blessed.
But Luke was certain he was cursed.
17
He was shoveling snow out of frustration rather than any need to keep the walks clear, when he heard a car pull up out front. He was working on the flagstone path that led from the back door to the alley. He heard boots crunching through the snow. When he came around front, he saw Billy McReady peering through the little window in the front door. He knocked, kept peering.
“Hey, Billy,” Luke said.
He jumped. “Luke,” he breathed. “Man, you gave me a start.”
“Sorry. Don’t get many visitors these days.”
“I bet. Glad to see you’re doing okay.”
Billy was the County Sheriff and they’d gone to school together back in the day and smoked a lot of dope, something Billy never mentioned anymore. Wakefield did not have its own police force, they contracted with the Sheriff’s Office, and Billy worked out of the jailhouse downtown.
Leaning on his shovel, flakes of snow drifting around, Luke shrugged. “I’m getting by, I guess. Want a cup of coffee?”
“I could do with it.”
Billy followed him into the garage. Luke had a pot going. He poured them both a cup and they sat on lawn chairs by the woodstove.
“Mind if I smoke?” he said.
“Go right ahead.”
They chatted for a bit. Luke told him about his situation and how now it seemed that Megan and Sonja had slipped into some kind of coma and he didn’t expect they’d come out of it. Billy said his wife passed the week before. Luke was sorry to hear about it. Angela had been the leader of Megan’s Brownie troop a couple of years before.
“I had her cremated,” Billy said. “I didn’t want her going into the pits. And I didn’t want something worse happening to her.”
What that was, he didn’t say.
“Lots of people are pulling out…but where are they going to go? All towns are the same now and some are worse than others.” He pulled o
ff his cigarette. “My brother Joe is down in Sauk City. It’s bad there. Real bad. Goddamn city is empty. He says you can knock on doors all day long and nobody ever answers ‘em. It’s getting like that here. A few people out today, but not many.”
Luke sipped his coffee. The same sick horror he’d been feeling for days was filling his belly, rising up and wedging in his throat. He could barely swallow. “What’s it going to be like next week? Next month?”
“A graveyard,” Billy said and would say no more about it. “I’ve been driving around today, knocking on a lot of doors. Basically just checking on people I know. You’re one of the few that was home.”
“The others are home, too, Billy, but they’re dead or too sick to answer the door.”
He nodded. He had something clenched in his fist. He’d been toying with it since he sat down, but he wouldn’t let Luke see what it was. But Luke knew: a rosary. Billy was gripping it like his life depended on it and maybe, just maybe, it did.
“The Army has full authorization now to go into any house they want to collect the dead and the infected. They don’t need to knock,” he said. “If you see them coming up the street in one of their trucks, they’re probably coming for your girls.”
“They can’t have them.”
He offered Luke a sickly smile. “They’ll shoot you down.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
They sat there for a long time in uncomfortable silence. There were things Billy wanted to say. Maybe there were things Luke wanted to say, too, but neither of them had the guts to put their dread into words. Maybe that was a good thing. To talk about what they both feared would have been like confirmation of it.
“What’s the rosary for?” Luke finally asked.
“It was my mother’s. She was a lapsed Catholic. We didn’t bury her with it. Makes me feel good, I guess, just to hang onto it. Especially at night. That’s when I need it most.”
Luke wanted to ask him why, but he didn’t. He just couldn’t bear the idea of what he might have said. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear about any of it.