Apokalypsis Book One

by Kate Morris

  “Explain it to me.”

  His thumb moved gently back and forth on her knee, which made her breath freeze in her chest.

  “It’s just that, well, when things like that happen I just…I can hide from it.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked and pushed a lock of her hair that had fallen out of her ponytail behind her ear.

  She didn’t like it like that. She liked it down and forward and hanging over her face slightly. Last year, Dez had convinced her to get it cut when they went to the beauty salon for Destiny to get hers highlighted. It was a huge mistake. She would never cut it off again. She’d had it chopped to about three inches below her chin, and it had been awful. Destiny and her mother convinced her it looked great, but Jane no longer could hide behind it like a veil when she didn’t want to see people. She was glad it had grown back out quickly.

  “I had to be in a lot of bad…situations when I lived with my mom, Roman,” she said and held her hand out toward the television. “Let’s just watch this.”

  “No, I want to talk about this. And I want you to know you can talk to me about it.”

  She pursed her lips and weighed whether or not she could trust him. He gave her leg a gentle squeeze.

  “Sometimes it was just really bad,” she confessed.

  “Tell me,” he encouraged.

  She felt like he was hypnotizing her with his blue eyes and the intensity of his stare. Jane sighed and decided to tell him some of it. “She would drag guys home. I don’t know from where. Bars? The street corner?” she said with a little laugh. He just nodded patiently. “When I told you I lived in Cincinnati, that wasn’t quite the truth. I mean, we did live there, but not long. It’s just the last place we lived before my mom got arrested. Well, when she got arrested this last time. We lived all over, not just Ohio. This is just where she was from.”

  “Where else?”

  “We lived all over Ohio, Detroit, near Pittsburgh, Indianapolis. It didn’t matter. I think we lived in five or six different states. Kentucky for a couple months. As I said, it didn’t matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “When you live in the places we lived, in the neighborhoods we lived in, they all look the same. We could’ve lived in London or Paris or New York, and it would’ve looked the same. It wasn’t the city. It was her lifestyle and the way she lived and the people she surrounded herself with.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said with sympathy.

  “Whenever she bottomed out, we’d come back here. She’d live off of Nana Peaches until she got enough saved up, or got sick of Nana getting on her case, and then we’d split. I didn’t even know Nana before I was sent here to live with her four years ago. She was just some older lady we stayed with for a few days here and there.”

  “But I don’t remember you going to school here. I’ve lived here my whole life. I don’t remember you starting school here until the middle of the eighth grade.”

  Strange that he knew that with such detail. She hadn’t thought she even blipped on Roman Lockwood’s radar. “I went to kindergarten in a town close to here. Then another time when we moved back, she enrolled me in school a town south of here because we rented an apartment there. Usually, she’d hit up Nana Peaches in the summer.”

  “That’s too bad. I wish we’d gone to school together before, too.”

  She looked at him as if he were crazy. “Why would you care? It wasn’t like I was going to fit in any differently in grade school. I never did. My mother would show up to parent-teacher meeting days dressed in a mini-skirt and tank top and high heel wedges, and all the dads would drool over her, and the moms would glare. It was awful, and she was embarrassing, even then.”

  “I just feel like I got cheated time with you, is all. That’s why I care.”

  “Until two weeks ago, you never even noticed my existence.”

  “Not true. Very, very much not true, Jane. I noticed. For quite some time, I’ve noticed.”

  There it was again. That intensity, that piercing gaze. She shook her head to clear away the haze.

  “We’d stay close to Nana Peaches or with her until my grandmother would get sick of my mother’s behavior and laid down the law, gave her guidelines and rules. My mother doesn’t do rules. She was arrested three other times before this last one stuck.”

  “What would happen to you when she was arrested?”

  She swallowed hard as those memories resurfaced, “I’d get taken into custody by Child Services and then foster care for a few days till she made bail and convinced a judge it was all just a big mistake.”

  “If she was arrested for stuff, how’d she get out of it?”

  “My mother was very convincing. She was also very beautiful, and she never looked like a druggie. I don’t know how she did it, but she was still youthful and beautiful. And she knew it, too.”

  “At least I know where you get it.”

  Jane blushed and looked away. She was nothing compared to her mother, who could seduce a priest with just one glance. Roman moved his hand from her knee and turned her chin to face him.

  “I’m not bullshitting. You’re beautiful, Jane Livingston.”

  She blushed harder, and this time when she looked away, he let her go. Then he clasped her hand in his.

  “Well, she made it quite clear who the beauty in the family was. She said if I learned to dress better- meaning slutty- that I’d get my own boyfriends. I didn’t want one. No thanks. Not after I saw the creeps she dragged home.”

  His eyes narrowed for a second as if he were contemplating something.

  “Was it bad in foster care?”

  She nodded. “About like going to school here.”

  “That sucks. Did anyone…hurt you?”

  She shook her head and said, “No, nothing like that. Kids were just mean. Nothing new there. I was pretty used to it. I learned very early on to keep my head down, just get through the day, avoid her gross boyfriends, don’t look at the ones coming for their stuff, their fix, or for her. So foster kids were nothing compared to my life with her. My mother’s friends and boyfriends were disgusting people, the worst of the worst.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Memories assailed her, nothing pleasant, and she recited them as if she were watching a movie in her mind and translating it for someone else, “Head down. Just survive. Don’t stay in the room if Mom isn’t in there. Avoid them. Don’t look them in the eye. Bedroom isn’t safe. Never a lock. Better outside. Stick to the backyard. Better yet, go to the park.”

  “Jane,” he whispered and rubbed her back as she spoke.

  These words had never been spoken to anyone else. It was like a floodgate had been opened. She never even told Nana Peaches, although her grandmother probably already knew the kind of men her daughter hung out with. She’d raised her. She knew Maureen was a skank degenerate motivated by two things, her next high and cash.

  She could see her last days with her mother so clearly. It was like watching her life tick-tick-ticking along behind her eyes in grainy picture stills. “Stay away from that guy. He tried to talk you into prostituting for him. Bad guy, really bad one. Try to sneak and call Dad later. She never lets me talk on the phone to him, though. Then he’d find me again and take me away like last time. Just don’t be around any of them. Just… avoid. Others weren’t as bad as this one. He hits Maureen. A lot. He does different drugs. Play at the park. Don’t have friends. Can’t go to their houses. They know who Maureen is and what she does. I know some of their fathers, though. Maureen does stuff with them for money sometimes when she’s really broke or lost her job again. Stay away from them, too. Don’t even want to be friends with those kids anyway. Their dads are gross. Just like a lot of Maureen’s boyfriends. One tried to touch me. Back to the park again. Only kid there since it was cold and snowy. Oh well. Better than at the house.”

  Roman inhaled sharply, but she couldn’t stop. For so long, she’d kept this all a secret. She’d never even told Child Protective Services. M
aureen had made it quite clear what was acceptable to say. Nothing. Jane didn’t even care if Roman told everyone at school. She only had the rest of this year to get through. She went through almost fourteen years of hell with Maureen. She could do a few more months around kids who superiorly thought they were the worst thing she’d ever had to put up with. They didn’t have a clue. Real monsters were out there lurking outside the safe walls of their protected little communities.

  “Then it happened.”

  “What happened?” he asked as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to know anymore.

  “She killed Darrell,” she explained. “They were drunk, high, the usual. Darrell hit her. She went off. She struck him over the back of the head with a bottle of beer. He got back up, though. I stood in the corner with my hands over my ears. I didn’t call 9-1-1. That was a no-no. I did once when I was little, maybe four or five. They told us in school to do that when we needed the police to help. Maureen was angry. Her boyfriend at the time got hauled off to jail. Then she punished me, even though she had the black eye and a bruised arm. But the night she killed Darrell was different. I just didn’t want to hear them doing that to each other, so I stood there too scared to move but too scared not to watch. I wasn’t sure if he would kill my mom and I’d have to become a prostitute because she’d be gone and I’d be stuck there with him.”

  “I think your grandmother would’ve taken you in,” he said gently.

  “I didn’t realize that. Maureen always made Nana Peaches out to be the bad-guy. We’d lived with Darrell for three months, a long time for Maureen to be with anyone. He started wailing on her with a tennis racket, an old wooden one. I don’t even know why that was lying there. I’d never seen anything like that before in the living room. It just appeared all of a sudden amongst the usual debris lying around,” she said, the images flitting more quickly across her memory now. “Then she managed to get up to her knees. I saw the knife in her hand before he did. If he had, he would’ve taken it and used it on her. She stabbed him in the shoulder. Then she shot him.”

  “Shot him?”

  “Yes, she had a gun. My mother dealt and used drugs. She always had a gun on her. She shot him in the head. I just remember thinking he’d wake up, that it wasn’t really happening. I couldn’t comprehend what had just happened. It was too much of a bad nightmare this time, even worse than the actual nightmares. Then the police came because someone called the cops. The rest is history. They took her away. I went to CPS again until Nana Peaches came to get me a few days later. It took them a while to figure out who my next of kin was because Maureen wouldn’t tell them who to call. She wanted me to be as miserable and in a bad way as her. She wanted me to be stuck with another foster family and in the system.”

  “That’s disgusting. And selfish.”

  “She was a prostitute, drug addict, and murderer,” she said glibly. “She didn’t exactly have much for a moral compass.”

  “No,” he agreed and rubbed her shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to go through all of that.”

  “Not me.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  She shrugged and answered honestly, “If I hadn’t had the life I did with Maureen for the first part of my life, I might not appreciate the one I have now.”

  “I think you still would,” he said. “Shit, now I feel like a jackass complaining about my mom searching my room.”

  She turned to him and shook her head and offered a gentle smile. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Just because you have a nice life with your family doesn’t mean it means less because you haven’t had some great and tragic struggle. It’s okay. I’ve resigned myself to being okay with my life, too. Don’t feel bad about yours. Everyone just gets dealt a hand to begin their lives, but it doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it forever. We can always rewrite our own destiny.”

  He nodded and pulled her close.

  “I’m sorry you went through all of that. I’m sorry, even if you aren’t,” he said as she leaned her head against his shoulder. “I understand now why you’re so good at processing this shit when it’s happening.”

  “I just have a good compartmentalizing control switch,” she said with a grin. “I just go into shut-down mode.”

  “I guess so,” he said with care.

  “It’s fine. Really. I’ve got Nana Peaches. And Dez. And my dad.”

  “And me,” he whispered and ran his knuckles down over her cheek.

  Jane inhaled and held it. Then she said, “Let’s watch this kook doctor and see if the whole world is going to become zombies. I’ll fit right in. I hung out with a bunch of them for thirteen years.”

  He chuckled and ran his thumb over the crest of her cheekbone. She was glad she didn’t start crying in front of him. That would’ve been even worse, totally embarrassing.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell anyone any of that. It’s just between you and me. Anything you ever tell me in our lives is just between us.”

  “Our lives? That’s a weird way to say something.”

  “I won’t even tell our kids, Johnny and Cash,” he said with an impish grin and a scandalous wink.

  Jane scowled and said, “Start the show, rebel boy.”

  He laughed and pressed play. She was glad for the reprieve in discussing her horrible childhood.

  “And, Doctor,” the host was saying, “the other day you were saying that this disease is spreading faster than anyone thought possible. Can you explain that further?”

  “There is a way that we calculate using mathematics how contagious a disease can be,” he explained, still hidden behind the dark screen. “It’s called the epidemiological parameter, or Ro factor.”

  “And how does that work?”

  He said, “For the AIDS epidemic, we calculate it at a two to five, which means for every two infected people they will infect five more. It’s a high number. With the average flu, we calculate it at a one to one. Not that high, right?”

  “And this new RF2?

  “We are seeing numbers in the one to twenty ratio.”

  The host sucked in a deep breath that mimicked Jane’s.

  “With those numbers…” the host stammered. “Doctor, with those kinds of numbers, how would we defeat something like this?”

  “I’m afraid it’s probably too late,” he said with brutal honesty.

  The host chuckled nervously before recovering, “What do you mean, sir? Isn’t the CDC on this or the WHO?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Every organization on this earth is working on it right now. The problems are the mutation, the Ro numbers, and the lack of a working vaccine.”

  “And if you can come up with a vaccine? What then?”

  There was a long pause, “As I said the other night. It would take weeks, months even, to release a vaccine. By then, it’ll be too late.”

  “What do you suggest? Washing hands and…?”

  “Hand washing? This isn’t just a contact germ like we originally thought. We have reason to believe the mutated RF2 could be airborne now. It’s one of the problems.”

  “What about face masks?”

  “Those could work, for a while, at least.”

  “And what about people who are immune? You said you thought that some people had immunity to the first one, RF1?”

  “Yes, we believe from everything we’ve seen that maybe as high as twenty-five percent of the population could have a natural resistance.”

  “Twenty-five? That’s good? That’s terrible!”

  “Yes, I know, but it means that as long as we still can, we can study those who are immune. That will eventually be the key to the vaccination formula.”

  “I don’t know about where you are, folks,” the host said, turning to the camera, “but we’re seeing an awful lot of military maneuvers out here in California. Can you say if it has anything to do with this virus, Doctor?”

  “No comment,” he said evasively.

  Roman said, “Well, I’d say that was a firm �
�yes.’”

  “No kidding,” Jane agreed.

  The host then asked the million-dollar question, “The ones who are infected with this new, mutated RF2, what will happen to them?”

  “They’re being kept in quarantine when we’re able to catch them alive.”

  “Yes, I realize that, but if you don’t get a vaccine completed, then what? What are your long-term plans? Will they be kept in hospital custody? Are we supposed to lock them all up in designated ‘infected zones’?” the host asked with air quotes.

  “As of yet, we don’t have a plan in place,” the doctor admitted. “Or enough room anywhere to house that many people. If the numbers are telling the truth, we could be looking at fifty percent or more of the population who could come down with this.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jane whispered. “How…I just…”

  She couldn’t form a rational thought and dropped it as they listened.

  “Are they violent with one another or just against those who are not infected?”

  “Yes, they don’t seem to show preferential behavior toward those who are infected like them. Possibly later they might learn to recognize that they are the same as them, but as of yet, no. They express equally disturbing behavioral patterns even among their own, if you will.”

  “And with this new RF2, is the tendency toward violent behavior worse than we were seeing in RF1 or the same?”

  “It is, by far, much worse. It’s as if the entire brain has shut down except for their own survival instincts. They don’t express empathy, remorse, sadness, fear, nothing. The only thing we see is violence, inattention to detail, inability to focus. They seem bent on murder and only the most basic survival skills. Think of taking the DNA of a serial killer and mixing it with a grizzly bear. There you have it. Again, the speech patterns seem affected, as well. Their ability to communicate is almost non-existent. They are also faster, too. We’re not even sure how that’s possible.”

  “By survival, what do you mean?”

  “Food, water, shelter, simple basic survival. We’ve caught them eating raw meat, animals they’ve killed, rats, birds, anything they can. We’re literally going to have potentially millions of unleashed serial killers running rampant in our country and in the world soon.”