by Beth Hersant
“We don’t have the equipment we need for that,” Wyn said.
“Which is why we need to start training. We have to learn how to carry out raids. I’m not sending anybody out for that equipment until they know how to handle themselves.”
“Louella,” Alec laughed, “you’re looking at a room full of hunters.”
“Yeah, but when was the last time a buck tried to eat you?”
“She’s right,” Patience nodded. “We need tactical training before we go — how to work together as a team, how to sweep an area …”
“And you’re going to teach us that,” Louella told her. “Congratulations, Patience, you are the new Head of Security. When we go back out into that mess, I want us functioning like a frickin’ SWAT team.”
“It all sounds good,” Bib said quietly. “I … I’m just having a hard time picturing that.”
“And that’s what we have to change. We have to stop thinking that we can’t do these things and just get on with doing them. And the only way to do that…” Lou gestured toward Patience.
“… is to learn how,” the sheriff nodded.
Louella continued: “Which just leaves point number three — Rest. We have all been working around the clock to get this place fortified. It was necessary. But now, everyone is going to have a break everyday — take a nap, read a book, watch a movie, have some fun. Peg, you double majored at college …”
“Yeah, Library Science and Psychology.”
“I want to put that psychology background to use which is why I’m putting you in charge of morale.”
Peg’s face clouded over. “So I’m … what? Julie from the Love Boat? Entertainment director for Camp North Star?”
“No, you’re the person with the psychology degree who can help us deal with the PTSD epidemic that we’re likely to see here. Whether it takes counseling or giving us all coping strategies or organizing some fun, I don’t know. But I know we need to do something. It’s the apocalypse. And the question I’m posing to you is how do we stay sane?”
Peg went pale and slightly green as the full ramifications of her new job became clear to her. As she wrapped her head around the idea, Louella delegated other areas to the “experts.”
“Wyn and Niamh, you are our medics.”
“Whoa, I’m only pre-med,” Niamh said. “You said experts and I’m not one.”
Louella shrugged. “So become one. Wyn is the best vet in the area so he can help you and,” she looked at Peg who was still looking a little nauseous, “you snagged a bunch of medical books from the library, right?”
“Huh? Uh, yeah. There’s a ton of information there.”
“There you go,” Lou said to Niamh. “Alec, you obviously are in charge of the development of the site. Arnold, I’m putting you in charge of the animals.” He opened his mouth to raise an issue, but Lou cut him off. “I’m not saying you have to do all the work yourself; I’m saying that you’re in charge of that area.” When he nodded his agreement, she continued: “Fletch will manage the guard schedules and patrols. Now that we have fences, we need to inspect them everyday to make sure they stay intact and that nothing is digging under them to get in. I also want you to help sort plans for additional defenses. Bib, you’re managing our provisions and planning the meals. Sam, it’s now your job to maintain the weapons and teach gun safety. Levi, you’ve got the motor pool. And Josie, you’re better with a needle and thread than anybody I know. I need you to keep us clothed and I want you to start thinking about armor.”
“Armor?” Josie asked.
“When we do leave the farm, we’re going to need protective clothing to keep from getting bit.”
“Hoo boy,” Josie sighed.
“Sucks to be given a job, doesn’t it?” Louella’s voice was jolly, her grin wide.
“Ah, sweet revenge,” Fletch muttered.
“No. I’m not doing this to get you back for making me chief. I just don’t have all the answers and I’m hoping that, if we put our heads together, we can figure this out.”
Louella had outlined her plan decisively and confidently, but it was a confidence she did not feel. In truth her head was pounding. She’d always been prone to migraines and they had gotten worse and a lot more frequent since becoming chief. Take today, for instance. Delegating was the right thing to do. She’d read a zombie book once, The Cost of Living by David Moody, in which a family barricades itself in against the ravening hordes. To Louella’s mind, the main character had one fatal flaw: he tried to shoulder everything. At the time, she’d called it the “One-Man-Band-Syndrome.” Not only had it overtaxed him, but it deprived his family of the ability to exercise any control over their situation. And so, with that example in mind, she had decided to give people their own domains — something they could put their minds to. She hoped it would empower them, give them a greater sense of control and provide an intellectual distraction from the horror of recent events. But what if it backfired — what if it was too much? What if, instead of thriving in these roles, everybody worked themselves into the ground or cracked under the pressure? Because that was Louella’s greatest fear for herself. When she was just making suggestions and helping people settle in at the farm, she was ok. But now she was in charge. Whatever happened, happened on her watch; and so while her workload hadn’t really changed, the pressure on her increased tenfold. She was eating NSAIDs as if they were M&Ms.
“Lou?”
The chief looked up. It was Niamh. “What is it, honey?”
“What about Owen?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it seems like everybody has a job except him.”
Just the mention of Owen made Louella’s head throb harder. “I’ll tell you what: when he can be bothered to drag his ass to the table for a meeting, then I’ll give him a job.”
Niamh looked hurt at the response, but only nodded and walked away. The old woman leaned back in her chair and watched her go. Owen was another problem she’d soon have to address. The kid was depressed; that much was clear. He had trouble hauling himself out of bed — it was like he couldn’t face the day. But that meant that he was always the last person to join in and help with the work. It didn’t make him popular. He rarely spoke and when he did he was caustic. All in all, people thought he was a douche. So what the hell was she going to do about it? Nothing immediately occurred to her. She reached into her apron pocket for her bottle of Aleve. What was the joke by John Barrymore? “America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks.” Truer words were never spoken.
Human perceptions are intrinsically skewed by what psychologists call “negativity bias.” From our earliest days in the caves, our brains had to become finely attuned to potential dangers — we had to be hyperaware of the bad things in our lives. That is how we survived as a species. This instinct became so ingrained that, even today, we automatically react more strongly to negative stimuli than to positive. For instance scientists have calculated that, within our relationships, one insult cannot be counterbalanced by one compliment. It takes no less than five positive comments to neutralize the hurt feelings caused by one snipe. Why? Because we fixate on and remember the bad far more clearly than the good.
At Camp North Star there were quite a few good and productive days. However, these were easily undermined by the problems that arose. Yes, security fences now enclosed the outbuildings giving them more space. Yes, Louella was bringing her seeds on for the vegetable garden and by summer they would have more produce than they could eat. The surplus they would blanch and preserve and put by for next winter and that was good. But the hope they derived from these improvements evaporated with the arrival of Mared.
Mared Dietz, Effie’s daughter, drove up to the gate one grey morning in late February. Louella recognized her goddaughter’s car, but could barely recognize the wild-eyed creature
that emerged from it. Her clothes were soiled with blood and feces. Her hair, which had been her pride and joy, was a matted, filthy rats’ nest. And she was drooling. Saliva gathered thickly at the corners of her mouth.
“Lou,” she called as she gripped the fence. “Let me in!”
“She’s infected,” Fletch muttered to Louella as they approached the fence.
“Hi honey.” The chief plastered a smile on her face. “What happened to your arm?”
Instinctively Mared hid the bloody limb behind her back.
“If you’re bit, you don’t have to hide it. Now tell me what happened.”
“It — it was mom!” the girl stammered. “But she didn’t mean it, she’s sick. And I thought that maybe you could help her and — and this.” She held up the arm with its torn skin and exposed bone. “It hurts so much and I couldn’t get to you and …” Finally overcome, she sank to her knees and cried.
All the people of the farm were out on the scaffolding now, watching this exchange. If the revelation that Effie was infected had shocked or pained the chief, she did not show it. Instead she sat down on the ground across from her goddaughter. And they heard her say, “Did you see the CDC report? The one where they gave us instructions for the vaccine?”
“I — I can’t remember.”
“They told us how to make the cure.”
The woman looked up, her eyes big with hope. “Really?”
Louella’s face was beatific, that of an angel. “Really. Everything’s gonna be ok.”
“For my mom too?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God, I — I…” Mared started to say, but suddenly she went rigid and fell over on her side. Her eyes rolled back, her jaw clenched and her whole body started to twitch.
“She’s seizing!” Niamh shouted and ran toward them.
Louella bellowed “Stop!” so fiercely that the young medic skidded to a halt and stared at her wide-eyed.
When Lou turned back to face Mared, she saw that the muscles in her neck were pulled taut, her lips were blue and her mouth and nose were streaming.
Louella rose and unlatched the gate. As she pulled it open, she heard a dozen guns cock behind her. She went to the stricken young woman and knelt beside her.
“It’s ok,” she soothed. “You’ll be all right in a minute.”
She drew a little .22 Rimfire out of her pocket and shot Mared in the head.
The dull crack of the shot was swiftly followed by a second. Patience had taught them to double tap a target — just to be sure. And then Lou rose unsteadily to her feet. Fletch reached out to her, but she batted his hand away.
“Close the gate,” she ordered.
The others had joined her on the ground now. From the level of her eyes, it looked like she was talking to their belly buttons. “I want full protective hazmat clothing for the cleanup team. There’s a spare tarp in the shed, wrap her up in that. And then we need to build a pyre. I want guards on the ground and at elevation to cover the cleanup crew while they’re outside the fence. I don’t want anything to see the smoke and come looking. So we’ll pray over her and burn the body after dark.” She finally raised her eyes. They were red and raw. “Go on now.”
As she walked back to the house, she passed Owen. “Yet more Christian charity from our fearless leader?” he asked.
Her fist shot out from her side and connected with his crotch. He moaned and dropped to his knees. Leaning down into his face she spat, “Wrong. Fucking. Day.” As she continued on her way, she shouted over her shoulder, “Owen’s on cleanup.”
Once inside, she made a beeline for the bathroom and knelt there waiting to see if she was going to be sick. Nothing happened so she doused her face with cold water and studied herself in the mirror. She was ghastly pale, slack-jawed, and wide-eyed. So that’s the face of a killer, huh? And she heard her father in that moment, back when he was minister of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, as he recited the Liturgy for Infant Baptism over Mared.
“Do you promise to share responsibility for this precious child?” he’d asked her. “To pray for her, and walk with her in the way of Christ to help her take her place within the life of the Church.”
And she had answered, “With God’s help, I will.”
So what about today then? Every moment she delayed in pulling that trigger was another moment of needless suffering for Mared. She knew that. She knew her goddaughter could not be saved and they would have to put her down. She also knew that there was no one on the farm she could have delegated that job to — it was too much to ask. She wanted to tell herself that she had done right by Mared, because Mared was now at peace. But all these thoughts brought her no comfort and my God, her head was an all-encompassing throb so excruciating that it made her pant. She rummaged through the medicine cabinet and knocked back four aspirin and two Tylenol and then sat down on the bathroom floor and waited for the painkillers to kick in.
She became aware that something was jabbing her in the side. She pulled the gun from the pocket of her body warmer. The Walther was squat, uniformly black and a comfortable fit for her small hands. She had just shot Mared with that gun to spare her further suffering and for one moment that verged on insanity, she wondered whether she should extend the same mercy to herself. Instead she pocketed the gun, rose, and went to sweep out the barn.
The sun set at five-fifty that night and Mared, who had been laid out on wood, covered in hay and doused in petrol, was set alight. If the people of the farm thought that it would smell like cooking meat, they were mistaken. There is a quality to burning human flesh that is innately human. You can say that people are just thinking animals and you can say that elementally our bodies are made of the same stuff as the cattle and the deer. But burn a human body and you will never forget it.
It was not an odor that people wanted to keep company with and so they retreated into the warmth and light and clean air of the farmhouse. Only Louella lingered with Fletch at her side. As she watched the flames consume the shrouded figure, she asked, “What must they think of me?”
“Well, the general consensus is that you have brass balls the size of Detroit.”
“I killed her.”
“You gave her peace. And people were just relieved that someone else did the job.”
“Who could I have asked to do that?”
“I would have done it for you.”
Louella looked at him. He was staring straight at her and there was such kindness in that gaze. She leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder.
“It was hilarious when you hit Owen in the nards.”
Louella laughed out loud and then clamped a hand over her mouth. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“He got off lightly. If he’d pulled that shit with Alec or Levi, we’d be sweeping his teeth up with a dustpan and brush. It does raise the question, though: What are we gonna do about him?”
“I was thinking about that today while I was sweeping out the barn. I’ve got an idea … finally.”
“Care to share it?”
“No, too tired now.”
“You know pretty soon things are gonna come to a head with that boy.”
“I know,” Louella said matter-of-factly. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
She didn’t have to wait long. Mared’s death, hell the condition she’d arrived in, had unnerved the group. That, combined with the horrible job of cleaning up the mess (the blood, the shards of skull) and burning the body (it took so long to render Mared down to ash) … well, everybody at the farm was pretty raw.
And so, when Owen failed to report for guard duty at the appointed time, people had had enough. He managed to appear for lunch and Peg glared at him.
“So you can come down for food, but not for guard duty, huh?” she asked.
“Maybe we should make a new rule,” Wyn said, look
ing up from his sandwich. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”
Owen’s mouth twisted into a nasty grin. “Well, that would allow us to get rid of your mother.”
“What?”
“She’s barely gotten off her ass the whole time we’ve been here.”
“She’s sick!” Patience stared at him in disbelief.
And it was true. Ginny’s recovery from the stroke had been knocked back by the stress of the outbreak and the abrupt cessation of her healthcare. She was frail, had mobility issues and suffered from post-stroke fatigue. It was a tiredness that did not get better with rest. She still had difficulty swallowing and her vision was impaired.
“She’s not contributing anything to the farm,” Owen shrugged. “But she’s eating and taking up a lot of time and for what? So we can convince ourselves that, despite the fact that we shoot women in the head, we really are good people because, look, we’re taking care of the resident vegetable?”
Levi, Wyn and Patience were on their feet, but Owen did not heed the warning. “Hey chief,” he called to Louella. For some strange reason, she was filling a canvas shopping bag with food. “You’re the one who’s so keen to blow people away, why don’t you do us all a favor and …”
Levi’s fist connected with Owen’s jaw before he could finish that sentence. The kitchen erupted then with some people swinging at the boy, while others tried to break up the fight. Mae screamed and clung to her mother, who hurried the children into the living room. Cutlery flew and dishes shattered in the general flailing of arms and legs as Owen was ejected out the back door. He landed on his ass, rose and kicked one of the chickens out of his way. The bird squawked in pain and hobbled off dragging a wing behind her.