This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (26 page)

Her dead husband would laugh his grinding cornball laugh that reminded her of her father’s awful jokes. How she had loved her dead husband and his stupid jokes. How easy things had been, to live with someone for forty years who was so easily amused, so ready with a smile even when there wasn’t anything much to smile about.
 

Marjorie knew she shouldn’t open and close the fridge door so much now that the power was off. She was wasting what cold was still left in the ice box — Jerry had always called them that long after there were no more ice boxes.
 

Checking the fridge was her small rebellion, a tiny defiance against Douglas Oliver. He’d taken over her house. His invasion had seemed a friendly gesture at first. Then he said it was too dangerous for her to be alone, so he became a fixture, coming and going at all hours without knocking. Oliver filled her home with supplies but warned her not to touch any of his inventory. He said any inconvenience she suffered was for her own good. He acted like he was the only one with all the answers, if only everyone would simply do as he ordered.

She reached in and touched the plastic bottle again, as if to reassure herself that yes, it was there; yes, it had weight. She’d gotten it for Al. His bottle of relish, old photographs and the smell of his clothes closet was all she had left of her husband. “We never took enough pictures,” she told the empty kitchen.

She didn’t look forward to eating the relish, but it was growing more tempting as the days stretched on. She had never had hunger pangs, not like this. She realized now that, before the plague, she had never waited long enough for hunger pangs to even begin to gnaw. She had run ahead of them to the fridge or the kitchen cupboard, never allowing herself to feel discomfort.
 

She stared at the bottle of relish. “I wish I’d gone with you, Al. What have I got to look forward to?”

People who knew hunger before the plague knew how to be hungry, subsisting on scraps. Mrs. Bendham now understood how wonderful a fully stocked grocery store really was. She had not been alone in this arrogance and advantage, but there was still some shame in this new knowledge.
 

Oliver regarded her with disdain, begrudging her needs. “Wait until the
real
famine hits,” he said. He allowed her a tiny portion of the meat now fouling her coffee table with grease. Oliver picked up an old paring knife and examined the circle of meat. He measured her worth and finally cut her a measly quarter of it. He held it out to her. His eyes told her she wasn’t worth a quarter slice of sausage.
 

“You can have this much. Chew slowly and maybe you’ll lose another chin. It’ll do you good. Plenty of protein in that.”

She’d eaten it in a rush, trying to slow down, knowing she should try to make it last, but failing. She’d swallowed it down, barely chewing. Then Marjorie Bendham hated herself for the gratitude she felt to the old man for that puny scrap. The hunk of meat slid down into her stomach, thick and hard to digest, feeling cold and heavy in her shrunken gut. It melted away. The hunger remained.
 

Her self-hatred moved on to something else: hating Douglas Oliver. He sat there, winding another length of rope and eyeing her like a dog begging at his table.
 

Marjorie knew there was canned food in her garage. She didn’t know how much, but she knew that, with all of Oliver’s nocturnal foraging and dealing, the boxes must have held many treasures. Sometimes she hoped someone would shoot him for looting.

She snuck out to the garage when Oliver was out on his midnight runs. Each dawn, he returned with more supplies, usually with Bently doing the heavy lifting. Oliver was stocking up for a rainy day, as if it wasn’t pouring torrentially right now.
 

She didn’t know what all the supplies were. He wouldn’t tell her, though Bently had a clipboard and tallied everything up for Oliver. Then the old man double-checked.
 

At first, Oliver had placated her with talk about his love for Al and how it was now his duty to see that she was safe through this crisis. Her husband had hit golf balls with Oliver, but she hadn’t thought they were as close as her old neighbor claimed. How much fun was hitting a golf ball to a blind man, really?

Marjorie returned to the kitchen to rummage through her cupboards again, finding nothing. Oliver put her canned preserves in a box, sealed it with duct tape and recorded the entry on his clipboard. Oliver warned her to stay away from
his
supplies. “We’re going to have to leave soon. If you want to be with us when we go, you’ll mind my druthers.”

His warning had infuriated her. The old queen, usually so charming, had moved in, lectured her, raged at her, and finally threatened her in her own home. “Touch any of that reserve and we all die! But you first. Do you understand?”
 

“Yes,” she’d said in a little girl voice she had forgotten, and backed away. He told her the supplies would keep her alive, but only when the time came. She began to think she was pawn to his king in a chess game where only he could see the larger board.

Citing her safety from the Sutr virus, Oliver had forbidden her from visiting the neighbors, even when she thought she’d go crazy if she didn’t walk outside and look at the blue sky. Oliver hadn’t allowed her to step outside her own door, even after Oliver had let the Spencers move into his own home across the street.
 

It galled her. She’d lived next door to the family for years. She knew the Spencers better than Oliver did. Not well, but they’d shared the same fence and talked amiably, always friendly, though not friends. She’d marched over with cupcakes the day they moved in years ago, the first and the only person in the neighborhood to attempt to make the young family feel welcome.
 

Mrs. Bendham had watched the Spencer kids grow up: The pretty girl growing to a young woman; that odd little boy growing up into an awkward, somewhat spooky teen who never looked her in the eye.
 

She searched her cupboards and found only tea. Then inspiration struck. The old woman got on all fours. Her knees creaked and ached and she had to cling to the cabinet to lower herself carefully.
 

All that was left in the cabinet with the Lazy Susan were an assortment of teas and spices. She pushed her head in further. The kitchen was too dark and she didn’t have a flashlight. Marjorie reached to the back and groped until her hand closed on a smooth, cool tin can. It had fallen to the back of the cabinet from the rotating shelf.

When she brought it out into the light, she found it was an expired can of seafood chowder. It was the white, New England stuff, not that awful, red New York chowder. The thought of it made her mouth water.

If Al were alive, he wouldn’t stand for Oliver’s demands and threats. But Al was dead, burned to a crisp somewhere, his ashes anonymous and in the wind. She resented him for that. He should have lived for her. If he’d loved her more, maybe he would have fought harder to survive. They’d dealt with his blindness and the cancer and his affair with a nurse when they were newly married. But they’d stuck for forty years. Then Al let the flu take him away from her.

She needed her dead husband to tell her what she should do. Instead, she was alone with Oliver and, as angry with him as she was, she was also afraid to tell him to go. If Douglas Oliver left without her, she would truly be alone. She’d be an old woman with no one to help her, no one with whom to talk, worry with and work through the problems of surviving.
 

Instead, she hid behind her curtains, staring out at the world and only daring sometimes to step out into the backyard at night when Oliver was out. She stared at the stars and wondered what Al would say now that she was a scared old woman, an old widow, ordered around by an old, cranky queen. And was Al now sighted and dancing with that slut of a nurse in some strange heaven?

The electric can opener would have made too much noise and alerted Oliver to what she was doing. Without power, making too much noise had become a non-issue. She dug a manual opener out of the back of a kitchen drawer and hurriedly cranked the tin. It was months past its best before date, but she was too hungry to worry about food poisoning.
 

Marjorie Bendham sat on the cold kitchen tile as the darkness gathered. She spooned the soup in cold. The chowder was a slimy gel that slid down her throat thickly. This time, she ate slowly.
 

When she was a little girl she’d sung in the church choir. Long after she lost interest in the church, she’d stayed so she could sing for an audience. A dimly remembered memory surfaced. She remembered the lavender and lace the old women around her wore, in much the same style as she wore now.
 

“In prayer,” her old preacher had said, “God doesn’t give you the right answer until you ask the right question.”

She prayed now, more to Al than to God. Looking for answers felt very much like groping for something lost in the dark. Then her mind closed around something cold and she thought,
Aha. I’ve finally asked the right question.

Knees cracking and clinging to the kitchen counter, the old woman pulled herself up. Once she was on her feet and steady, Marjorie opened the fridge door again and stared at the relish bottle.
 

Something clicked over in her mind, like a lever switch closing, completing a circuit. Soon she’d be hungry enough to eat that relish right out of the bottle, smearing her lips green as she greedily sucked it down.
 

When she became that hungry, she would have to eat Al’s “hot dog-slop”. When that was gone and the hunger pangs returned, Marjorie Bendham resolved to slip a steak knife from her kitchen drawer and, while he slept, she imagined the great satisfaction she would feel when she slit Douglas Oliver’s throat wide.
When his blood pumped out in spurting arcs, she would smile again. She might even grab a teacup and drink the old bastard’s blood for good measure. Plenty of protein in that.

The virus spreads, making evil minds

J
ack knelt beside Theo. Her husband lay sweating on Douglas Oliver’s living room couch. She thought of a freshly caught fish on a dock, gasping and bewildered, its gills working uselessly. Theo sweated so much, he hadn’t urinated all day. The trip down the front walk had exhausted him.
 

“You’ve got to drink more. You aren’t getting enough fluids.”
 

Her husband gave a weak nod and pulled his head up to take a small swig from the bottle of water she offered.
 

The carpenter’s mask she wore annoyed her, steaming her glasses and making her face uncomfortably hot. When she went outside to take it off, the air felt so fresh and cool, it was a release from choking claustrophobia. Jack wanted desperately to stay out in the backyard until this was over, but when would this be over? They couldn’t hide forever behind masks.

With little else to do, Jack had made it her mission to find a bendy straw to make it easier for Theo to drink. Oliver didn’t have a bendy straw in the whole house. She had searched until she was certain.
 

She continued to search in unlikely places until she had to admit defeat. Besides, a woman looking for bendy straws in the back of a clothes closet wasn’t really searching for bendy straws anymore. She was looking for distraction.

“I’ve been a good sport, God. Now let me off this ride. I want to get off.”
 

Anna was locked in her room. When Jack checked in on her, she was either crying, sleeping or pretending to sleep. Her daughter needed time.
 

Jack remembered the desperate need that soaked through her skin and surrounded her heart when she was a teenage girl in the throes of love.
 

Theo hadn’t been her first love, but theirs was a love built on a powerful foundation. Theo had taken her in his arms at the end of their first date, maddeningly sure of himself. “Let’s have our first kiss, and savor it and take it really slow. This is dangerous business,” he’d said, his lips almost touching hers, but not quite.

“Why dangerous?”

“Because this will be the last, first kiss for both of us,” he said.

“You sound awfully sure you’re my prince and we’re going to have a happily ever after.”

“I don’t believe in that. There’s no happily ever after in the end. This is our happily ever after right now.”

“You better shut up and give me my last first kiss before you talk your way out of the deal. These days, at the beginning, are the best of our lives.”
 

And they shared the kiss that had delivered them here and now instead of making other choices that would have led them into a different mystery.
 

Jack pushed the memory aside. That seemed like eons ago, something that happened to someone else. That was long before she started coloring her hair black. That was before she started wondering how long she could keep that up before her face and gravity would expose the pretense of hair dye. She was forty-eight. The Sutr Virus had broken up young lovers and made her feel old.

But at least she’d had her time. She had been to Paris, Mexico, Bermuda and had seen the country. She’d gotten married and had her children. She’d studied and had jobs and made it half-way through a normal life span. Or…maybe she had been middle-aged at twenty-four and hadn’t known it. If she had known she would die this year, would she have made different choices?

Of course, all that she had already accomplished in life wasn’t a salve at all. She thought it
should
be, but it
wasn’t
.
 

“Don’t confuse an ought with an is,” Theo would say.

Jack Spencer wanted
more
time. She needed Theo to live. Her husband had to live to help get the family back to safety in Maine. She needed him to live to see his children grow up. She needed his help to deal with Jaimie. If Theo died, she might just give up. If everything was reduced to surviving, there’d be no more room for living. Without Theo, she’d have to do it all herself and she knew she wasn’t ready to face that.