This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (18 page)

Before the Sutr-X Virus, Aadi reported for work just before ten in the morning and got home by nine to kiss the girls goodnight. The huge department store was closed, of course, but his manager called him each day to say the disease would abate soon and the store would open again. Aadi didn’t know what to believe, but he was glad to have the job.
 

When currency wasn’t useful anymore, Aadi’s manager, Mr. Richardson, paid the security staff with food supplies from the store. “Everything will get back to normal,” he affirmed. “This is London. We’ve seen worse than this.”

Riya’s death made the young security officer bold. “How could you have possibly seen worse, sir?”
“We suffer, but we have to take the long view. People used to say, ‘Think globally, act locally.’ I say, ‘Learn from the past, think of the future and act in the present. London has seen fire, war, the Blitz and another very notable plague. God and the Devil can get together and do their worst. London is the one city that will stand forever.’”

Aadi pulled the key ring from the clip at his belt and opened the glass door to Harrods, waving at the security camera. He assumed Dayo was watching from the back office, but he knew that could be hit or miss.
 

Dayo had been a calm and steady security officer before the plague. Now, she shook when she talked. She admitted to Aadi that sometimes she fell asleep on duty for ten or even twenty minutes at a time. She couldn’t sleep when she was supposed to, but when wakefulness was required, she fought to stay awake. He couldn’t blame her. He had difficulty sleeping. “You’re anxious and I’m depressed,” he told Dayo. “But who wouldn’t be messed up somehow?”

Before the plague, Aadi watched people from his station at Door 2 by the men’s tailoring department. He smiled and welcomed shoppers and asked tourists to take off their backpacks before allowing them to browse the world’s most famous department store.
 

Aadi’s name meant
first
, as in important. His job didn’t make him feel that way. When Riya was alive, his importance definitely came last. With his wife’s passing, he was promoted to second, with his daughters tying for first place.

He was about to lock the door behind him when his jaw went slack in shock. A small, naked woman walked down the middle of the street toward him. Aadi squinted. She looked about age sixty, perhaps more. The woman walked in a wide
S
pattern, as if leading an invisible conga line. A small dog — a cute little brown mutt — trotted ahead of her and she seemed eager to catch up to it.

As she came closer, Aadi could make out multiple bite marks, like bloody half moons that covered her shoulders, torso and legs.

He opened the door and called to her. “Lady? Lady! Come here! You will be safe in here! Get out of the street! I’ll get you help!”

She wandered his way, but seemed too confused to focus on him. She acted like she’d been in a car accident and suffered a concussion.

Aadi stepped into the street, turned his radio on and keyed the mic. “Dayo! There’s a woman in the street! She’s been attacked!”

“Lady? Come here! I can help you!”

The radio crackled a moment. “Door 2? Check in?” Dayo was awake.

“Stand by, Dayo. We’ve got a weird one.”

Aadi started toward her, waving his arms. “Lady? Who did this to you?”

The woman straightened her course and dove on the dog. It yelped and barked and tried to get away as she gathered the small animal in her arms. The dog struggled as she crushed it to her breasts. It nipped the tip of her nose and barked twice more.
 

The woman grabbed the dog’s snout and forced its head back. It had a second to whimper and void its bowels down her body. Then she buried her face in the little dog’s throat and ripped through the dog’s flesh. When she raised her head, blood dripped from her gore-spattered teeth and jaws. She chewed thoughtfully as she stared at the security guard with cruel, milky eyes. She smiled.

But it wasn’t the ghoulish smile that made Aadi’s knees weak and his heart race. It wasn’t even the careless way she threw the dog to the side and ran at him that made him cold with fear. It was the mob of ghouls up Brompton Road, racing to join her.

Aadi managed to get inside. The key clattered against the lock plate at the top of the door. Still, he locked the door behind him just in time.
 

The woman threw herself against the heavy door, heedless, like a bird flying into a window. He recoiled and fell on his back. She fell to the side, her forehead open and smearing an arc of streaked blood down the door.
 

When the others arrived, they paid her no attention. They trod over her to smear the glass with saliva and blood, pounding on the glass, desperate to get in.
 

No,
he thought.
Desperate to get at me.
The world’s rules had changed more than Aadi, or anyone else, could have imagined. Amid the mob, he saw the young and the old. Middle-aged mothers and graying fathers and young and fit yobs alike head-butted the thick glass. He saw a beautiful young girl break her teeth on the door handle in her hunger for him.
 

Aadi had seen poverty and desperation and tragedy in India. He’d endured great loss in his adopted country. He’d never seen ordinary people behave like rabid wolves.

Aadi got his feet under him and keyed his radio mic as he ran. “Dayo, check the doors again to make sure they’re all locked.”

“Already, done, mate.”

“Do it again, or we’re brown bread!”

“I did the rounds, I assure you,” she replied coolly. “There’s the woman you —”

He burst into the office before she stopped speaking into her radio.

“Look at the Door 2 cameras! Help me double check the perimeter or we’re brown bread!”

Dayo gaped at him as if he’d gone mad.

“Dead! Dead Dayo! Dead Aadi! Move your arse out of that chair and check the damn doors again or we’re the running dead!”
 

As soon as he could escape, he would run to his daughters. He would find them and protect them, if he could. Aastha’s name meant
faith and trust
. Aasa’s name translated to
hope
. If he lost his daughters to such animals, he would lose the past, the future, his heart and his mind.

Making history and the future poorer

T
he family worked through the night to gather their things. Anna cried off and on. Jack was stone-faced but her movements were harried.
 

“We’ll be right across the street,” Theo said, trying to soothe them.
 

His words seemed to placate the women the first time, but after he repeated it several times Jack blew up at him. “Damn it, Theodore! I know! I know! We’ll be right across the street. Across from our home. Away from the marks on the doorframe where I marked the kids’ height as they grew. Away from all our things. It’s the safe thing to do, to move into Doug’s house, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about running out of my home. We’re packing up here like we’re never coming back!”

“We have to prepare like we aren’t,” Theo said evenly.

She threw a sweater she’d been holding into a laundry hamper full of folded blankets. “I’m just sick of this. I’m sorry but this really sucks and…and…I want our life back. I want to wander around the mall and take the kids out for a movie and an ice cream.” She sat on the bed, defeat disfiguring her lovely face.

“I know,” Theo said. He sat beside her and rubbed her back. “You’ve got cabin fever and switching cabins isn’t helping.”

“That guy pounding on the window freaked me out,” she said. “We
should
go.”

“I know. When you call me Theodore, you must be freaked out.”

Jack melted a little. “Your hands are really warm,” she said and looked into his troubled eyes. “Did you load the van all by yourself?”

“Jaimie helped. Doug said we should park it in his garage so if that guy comes back he won’t be tempted to give us the gift of four flat tires in the morning.”

“You should have asked for more help packing up, Theo. You’re sweating something awful.”

“I have cabin fever,” Theo said.
 

“Are you okay? Really?” But she already suspected.

“I’m very tired,” Theo said. “That’s all. After we’re moved in across the street, I’m going to bed and I’m going to sleep until this is all over.”

“How much longer do you think this can go on?” Jack said.

“There’s no way to know.”

“You could lie. You could tell me it’ll be over soon. A well-placed lie would be great right now, actually.”

“You always know when I lie.”

She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder and then sprang back. “You’re too hot, Theo.” She put the back of her hand against his forehead.

“I got a lot of exercise hauling stuff across the street. Let’s not try to take everything. We don’t have to empty out the house because of one nut. Douglas has a kitchen sink, so we can leave ours here. Let’s just call it a night.”

Jaimie stood at the door, waiting for his mother to tell him to take a hamper full of clothes across the street. He watched his parents for a moment, observing the intermingling of their energies. He stepped forward and pulled his father away from Jack.

“What’s wrong?” Theo asked.

Jaimie shook his head. He clapped his hands together and then, mimed difficulty, as if his fingers were glued together. He then pulled his hands apart. Then he held his hands spread wide and shook his head more.

“I don’t get it,” Jack said.

Theo put a hand on his son’s shoulder and tried to smile. “Okay, buddy. Let’s get out of here. Take that basket please. We’ll be right along.” Jaimie shook his head but Theo nudged him out the door. “I understand. It’ll be okay.”

Theo turned to his wife. “He means I’m sick.” At the door he turned to look at her. “I never told you this, but you’re really bad at figuring out when I’m lying. Fortunately, it’s not something that’s come up much.”

“I thought I knew.”

“Maybe that was denial, but I don’t like that fish casserole of yours. I never liked your mom any more than I liked mine and all this perspiration is not exercise-related.”

Jack gathered herself and slowly stood. “I wish you’d just spoken up about the casserole. I don’t like it, either, but I thought you did, you lying idiot.” Her eyes were wet.
 

She moved to go to him but he shook his head and put his hands out to ward her off. He stepped backward, out through the bedroom door and into the hallway. “It’ll be okay. But we need you healthy. Doug’s got a nice leather couch. I’ll sleep there tonight. Maybe this is just regular flu. Sutr isn’t the only game in town.”

She followed him, but as if there was a wall between them.
 

“Regular flu has a low chance of killing me and if it’s Sutr, I-I’ll make it.”

Despite his claims she couldn’t tell when he was lying, Jack was sure he was certain. If it was Sutr, he was dying. “You…bastard! Don’t even think you’re getting away.”
 

Theo gave her a brave smile. He’d rehearsed this smile earlier that afternoon, as he felt the sickness slowly close him in a fist. “Well, thanks for making it easier to let go and go to the light.”

“You don’t believe there’s a light to go to.”

“Whenever there’s a light at the end of a tunnel, the wisdom of experience tells me it’s probably an oncoming train.”
 

Jaimie had come back from his errand to Oliver’s house. The boy stood at the bottom of the stairs behind his father. He watched the spots of black energy crawl over his father’s lungs, shiny at the edges, moving slightly in and out, a boiling soup of Sutr. His mother smiled at him, but a tear tracked down one cheek. Jaimie tasted chalk mixed with vinegar: hers was truly a bitter smile.

Jaimie knew bees and birds and dogs and chameleons all have unique visions of the world: infrared, black and white, stereoscopic. Still, no one really knows how anyone else sees the world. The color-blind think they know what red is until they’re told that they aren’t in on the common agreement everyone else is party to. Jaimie pushed the thought away because with it came an unfamiliar feeling. Something shifted over his heart.
 

That night, lying awake in Mr. Oliver’s bed, Jaimie pulled the covers over his head and flicked on the flashlight his mother had given him.
 

“Don’t go near the window at the front,” she had said. “If you have to get up in the night, use the flashlight and be quick.”

Under the yellow beam, Jaimie let his hand slowly caress the dictionary page. The sensuous texture ran under his hand as if he had put his hand out the window of a moving car, the subtleties of the air winding through his fingers, whispering through the Ls, alive and instructive, past “ligan” and “ligate”.
 

Soon his hand fell on “lonely.” A tingle of recognition swept through him. This was the word he was. With so few people around, he was no longer diluted with what was accepted as normal. A survivor among so many hiding, missing, silenced and dead, the boy was finally less alien. With no bullies, no judging eyes, no whispers and rude remarks, Jaimie felt more calm and less self-conscious then he ever had. He hadn’t been aware how self-conscious he had been until the Sutr Virus killed his tormentors.

The boy might even have been grateful for the plague, except the fever had his father now.

Howls rose in the distance, as if the dogs were telling him they were lonely, too. Out in the cold without masters, they knew this feeling. It was the first he’d identified in himself. Jaimie knew he was different, sick in the way the one-eyed king is sick in the Kingdom of the Blind. The boy wasn’t a king, though. He knew what “retard” meant, though the bad words had not hurt him like the ones he found for himself in the dangerous pages of his dictionary. L had lonely and loneliness. Tonight, he discovered that these words had the power to open himself to the feelings they described.
 

The other dangerous word — a word that had made him feel — he’d found in a medical dictionary. He had picked it up and started marching through the As when the word, early on and unexpected, “Asperger” hit him like a hammer out of the dark.