This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (35 page)

David gave them an elaborate bow and paused to endow Anna with a smile and a wink. “You’re welcome to come back, by the way. Hotness is always welcome.”

He backed up, and, before he turned away and disappeared into the mall, he nodded to Jaimie.
 

Jaimie nodded back.

Oliver had been silent since his heart attack ruse had failed. He could contain himself no longer. “That wasn’t smart! That wasn’t brave! That was lucky! You never tell an enemy you are unarmed.”

Jack shouldered her pack. “You’re right.”

“My god! I — ” Oliver began.

“I said, you’re right. What more do you want?”

“I want my bear spray back! It was the only weapon I had that worked at any distance.”

“It was our can to lose, not yours.”

“We’ve got a deal. You share everything with me and I help keep you alive,” Oliver said.

“Okay, so you just lost one-fifth of a can of bear repellant. Nobody likes a whiner, Oliver. You seem to already have forgotten that you used my son as a shield. You’ve forgotten. I won’t. When we get back to the house, we have some things to work out.”

Oliver started to reply. Jack cut him off. “And if I hadn’t tried to make friends, we’d be dead. How many of them did you think you could get with the bear spray before they killed all of us?”

The old man did not answer her question. He moved on quickly to his plans. “The only reason he let you have the hiking boots was they couldn’t possibly wear every pair they had. We should get some guns and come back and take this place. That’s exactly what we should do. They’re just a bunch of kids.”

“Right!” Anna said. “They’re just a bunch of kids trying to survive, so leave them alone.”

“We made a deal with them, Douglas,” Jack added. “I got this peachy bunch of plastic bags, too, so quid pro quo and yay, me.” She nodded to her children to follow her and began the trek home.

“Shopping is much more complicated than it used to be,” Anna said.

“Someday there will be more to life than this.” Jack hoped she sounded more sure than she felt.

“And we’ll be able to say we knew Baby Girl before she was a star,” Anna said.

“When her father threatened to bash in our heads to protect his looted stash,” Oliver added. “It’s a sweet, inspiring story. Makes me glad to be alive,” he said.
 

As they walked back down Fanshawe Park Road, the hulk of the abandoned ladder truck loomed up, now black in the deepening darkness.

“It shouldn’t get this dark so fast.”

“It’s the smoke,” Jack said.

“I can smell it now,” Anna said. “It’s blocking out the sun.”

“The wind shifted again. It was bound to happen,” Oliver said. “We might have to bug out tonight.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about the ‘we’ part, Douglas. I’ll talk to Theo about your place in our matrix.”
 

Jack made an unconscious decision and led them closer to the fire engine’s wreck this time. They made their way down the middle of the street rather than walk past the graffitied wall. They couldn’t read the messages without using their flashlights, but none of the expedition felt the urge to look at the wall again. The messages to and from the dead seemed a curse and an omen.

None of them said anything as they neared the broken truck.
 

Every ruin is a warning of what’s to come for everything,
Jack thought. That sounded like something her husband would say. It was as if Theo’s ghost walked beside her, whispering his obsessive thoughts about entropy.
 

She answered his thought:
We’ve been married too long, sweetie.We know each other so well, we don’t even need to speak anymore.

Though they knew the truck’s color in daylight, the darkness was so deep now they couldn’t see the engine’s red paint. They had forgotten how dark the world was without xenon gas streetlights and the ambient glow of a million burning bulbs.
 

Jack touched the truck’s cool metal with her palm as she passed. “If we could find these guys…if we could get one company of firefighters together, we’d all be okay, you know that? Touch the truck for luck.”
Like a talisman from an ancient world,
she thought.
 

“Like the opposite of walking under a ladder, huh?” Anna suggested.

A Latin phrase came to Jaimie. He’d studied it that afternoon. It was:
anguis in herba,
meaning
hidden danger
.

It was only four blocks, but it seemed much farther in the dark. They moved slowly, following Jack’s bobbing circle of light.
 

A dozen pairs of eyes followed their progress — wary and fierce — unseen and circling, closer and closer. The ragged creatures, drooling and impatient, ached with hunger. Only meat could slake them now.

Wolves howl louder when food's around

M
iseracordia Drive awaited them like a dark maw. The wind picked up and pushed them back, as if warning them away from home.

As they rounded the corner to the drive, Jaimie broke away from Anna, shot forward and grabbed the old man’s walking stick, pulling hard. Oliver instinctively resisted. Jack wrapped her arms around her son’s shoulders, pulling him back.
 

“What is it, Jaimie?”

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “What is it, Lassie? Did Timmy fall down the well?”

The boy pointed, not to Douglas Oliver’s house, but to his own. Flashlight beams moved back and forth through the Spencer’s windows. Strangers were in their house.

The salvage party had almost walked into the middle of their street. They moved to the side, sticking close to the shadow of a high hedge, to get a closer look. The Spencer’s couch was stuck half way out the living room’s shattered window.
 

“They didn’t see us.” Jack touched her son’s head and thanked him. The boy ignored her, peering instead toward the darkness behind them.

Anna crept forward, touched her mother’s shoulder and pointed beyond their house to the Bendham house. Marjorie Bendham stood in her front yard. She carried a large flashlight and paced. Bently stood in the Spencer’s driveway, talking to the old woman. They couldn’t hear their exchange.
 

A moment later, a man hooted and laughed as another began to howl like a wolf baying at the moon. Jack was reminded of the westerns her husband was so fond of, the ones where, at the beginning of the movie, the sheriff has been shot dead and chaos reigns at the local saloon. “Bently’s finally come back with friends.”

Friends and fiends and one little r
, Jaimie thought.
Funny how close those words are.
Could that be someone’s etymological joke? A little nod to how easy it is for one thing to become another thing entirely?
When he got back to Oliver’s house, he intended to go look up the word origins of
friends
and
fiends
.

The man who bayed like a wolf howled again, louder and crazier this time.

There were, the boy thought, many examples of language quirks in English. Irony, for instance, means that what one says is the opposite of what one means. The idea was ludicrous to Jaimie, and much more alarming than strange men wandering his home.

* * *

“What are they
doing
?” Anna asked.

“So far, stealing stuff that can be replaced, I suppose. Your Dad must be going crazy with worry. Thank God he’s safe on Oliver’s couch.”
 

Well, I assume he’s safe, came the ugly thought unbidden.
 

“We have to get back to Oliver’s house and let Dad know we’re okay. We’ll go through the backyards,” Anna said.
 

“Assert, engage, attack,” Jack agreed. She covered her flashlight with her fingers. In the faint glow, Jack could just make out the faces of her children. Anna looked terrified. She saw Jaimie’s face in profile and envied him. He had no anger or dismay. His mind was busy elsewhere, wrestling with what mysteries she could not guess.
 

No. That was unfair. He’d heard the men from half a block away, seen the flashlights and he’d known it meant danger. He’d warned them. Her son was still a mystery to her. However, under the stress of plague days, she’d seen more glimmers of what might be going on in her son’s head than she had through all the mundanity of their lives before Sutr came to town. Jaimie’s wiring might be pathological from a clinical perspective, but he was more functional than she’d ever expected in this crisis. That was good because, with home invaders threatening their safety, she needed Jaimie to be more than the strange, distracted kid with a book in his hand.

Jack inhaled deeply to quell her growing fear and anger. She turned off the flashlight so she could take her children’s hands in hers. “Stick close behind me.”
 

Oliver rose from a crouch and shook his head. “I’m too old to be running around climbing fences,” he said. “I’m going to have a chat with these fellows,” he said.

“That’s crazy!” Anna said. “Bently is with them. They’ll kill you.”

Before Oliver could answer, Jack flashed her light into his face, making him turn away squinting. “I don’t think they will,” she said. “They’re his friends.”

“Not friends!” Oliver said.
 

“But?”

“They work for me,” he said.

“Knew it,” Jack said.
 

Anna was stuck halfway over a fence and pushing through shrubbery. They couldn’t see her face but they could hear her voice tremble. “What’s going on, Mom?”

“Jaimie and I saw Oliver talking to that guy.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Anna said.

“It might,” Jack said.

“When were you going to tell me?” Anna asked her mother. The girl’s voice was an edged weapon.

“When I knew for sure what it might mean.” Jack kept her flashlight beam in the old man’s eyes. “What about it, Oliver?”

“In that hooligan David’s parlance, you might think I’m ‘playing’ you. I’m playing them. This isn’t a game. It’s about survival.”

“Ours or just yours?”
 

The old man paused a moment too long before answering.
 

“I think I have my answer,” Jack said. She took Jaimie’s hand and pulled him toward the fence. “We’ve got to go, kids.”

“I’ve got a deal with them,” Oliver said. “I’m using
them
. I’ve got this under control. Don’t be such a child! This is good news for you.”

“If it was good news for us,” Jack replied, “you would have told us before you had to.”

“They’re gathering stuff for me. I pay them from my jewelry stash. You think you’re going to survive the winter here without dealing with the black market? You think that little garden of yours is going to provide for all of us through the winter? The black market is the only market there is! Jacqueline, don’t be an idiot! I’m the ground floor. I’m Macy’s! I’m Sears! I’m the new Wal-Mart. By spring, if you want to get anything, it’s going to be through me. The people who survive this are going to be the ones who adapt early. I am
it!
”

“You lied to us, Oliver.” Jack groped for the fence and moved to Anna’s dark outline, pushing her over the top. She didn’t want to risk the flashlight anymore.

“I was going to tell you once things settled down,” Oliver said. “I haven’t met all of Bently’s group yet, but they need a leader. I can organize things so it’s better for everybody.” They couldn’t see his face but his voice sounded wounded, desperate.

“If Bently’s on your side, why get us to move into your house?”

“Because you’re my family. Everybody needs one and I needed — I
need
you on my side! Loners don’t make it in a disaster. No one who tries to get through this alone will survive. I’ve seen disasters before! Jacqueline, don’t do this!”

Anna was over the fence. She pulled back cedar branches so Jack and Jaimie could climb over easily. Jaimie paused to smell the sweet cedar and Jack nudged him forward. When he moved, she swung her leg over the wooden fence. A splinter dug into her palm as she tumbled after her son.

“You want a family, Oliver? There they are down the street, looting my house. You lied to me so I can’t trust you. Show me I can trust you, Oliver. Go prove we’re your tribe and not those screaming idiots.”
 

Jack pulled her children across the dark backyard toward the old man’s house. Theo would be worried. It occurred to her that her husband might even try to stop the looters, which wouldn’t be smart even if he weren’t so sick.
 

Oliver called after them. He was saying something to her, calling her name, but all she heard was the blood pounding in her ears as she ran blind, as fast as she dared.

A high fence marked the perimeter of the next yard but there was a gate and it was unlocked. Anna began to speak but Jack shushed her daughter. They were just three houses and across the street from the men who were rifling their house. A hundred miles would have been too close. Jack began to pant as her heart slammed against her breastbone. She hurried her children, holding hands, moving three abreast.
As if we’re all kids,
Jack thought,
like we should be skipping.
 

It was Jaimie who jerked his mother back, narrowly avoiding a fall into the pool at their feet. They skirted the edge of a large piano-shaped pool and, as one, stopped to listen.
 

A man yelled at someone, though the words weren’t clear. The wind was stronger now, pushing away the words and swallowing them up before the message could reach the trio.

“Is that Douglas?” Jack asked in a whisper.

“No,” said Anna.

The wind pushed clouds back from the moon. It emerged at their feet first, a white globe reflected in the pool. They looked up at the full moon, born from columns of smoke. Jack cursed under her breath. The moonless night had been to their advantage. Advantage: Vampires.
 

Light from the full moon bathed them white. Advantage: Werewolves.

Jack could see her children’s faces easily. Jaimie’s gaze was fixated, up and away, on the racing clouds, or perhaps, on the moonscape. With a stab of annoyance, Jack wished Anna’s boyfriend was here. Trent was a football player, and strong. Who was on her side but her girl, a very ill husband and the mostly mute son she loved but couldn’t reach? Maybe Douglas Oliver would be of help, but probably not. The old man might be selling them out, pointing to his house and saying to the wolf men, “Take your prisoners and do what you want.”