This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (8 page)

Mostly, Jaimie watched the old man’s haphazard patterns as Al Bendham pushed the long vacuum cleaner pole around the bottom of his pool. He
 
decided the appearance of action was more important to the blind man than actually cleaning the pool. He and Mrs. Bendham dog-paddled around in it occasionally in the evening, and sometimes their fat son (a real estate agent, Dad said) brought their little grandchildren, twin girls, over for a swim when the summer heat waves hit.

Jaimie waited. Though the radio blared, Mr. Bendham did not appear. The boy opened his bedroom window. Cold air spilled over him. However, his mother was already in the backyard, planting seeds.

Mrs. Bendham stopped what she was doing and called over, “It’s not too early for most things, but if you’ve got tomato plants, you should wait till the May long weekend! You’ll have to wrap whatever sprouts in plastic for a while. We’ll have a couple frosts yet!”

Jack stood, dusted off the knees of her pants and walked toward Mrs. Bendham, though not so far as the fence.

Mrs. Bendham smiled, her face tightening into more seams, wrinkles and lines. “You’re up early, today, Jacqueline.”

His mother gave a jerky nod. “Haven’t slept much in two nights,” she said. “You’re up early, too.”

“Yes, I hope my radio doesn’t disturb you. Mr. Bendham doesn’t feel like getting up this morning but he does love his radio. Sometimes I get so sick of it, I turn it to classical. He objects, but he seems quite dedicated to lying down at the moment.”

“He okay?”

“He’ll be fine. Just a little hot. He insisted we go to the hospital last week. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but he complains he’s feeling poorly ever since.”

“Oh?”
 

Jaimie was confused. His mother’s voice sounded neutral, but her colors yellowed more. He thought if he stood beside her, he’d taste lemon juice. The boy was glad he was safe in his flannel pajamas. He instinctively drew back from the window, not so much as to avoid being seen as to watch from a safer distance.

“…nothing serious,” Mrs. Bendham said. “He had a checkup at the prostate clinic. Some follow-up scans and blood work. I thought we should wait, but his surgery last year scared him so he wanted to be sure everything was fine. He’s the anxious type. I tell him most of what we worry about never happens. Al always says most of what we worry about eventually happens. Since the surgery, it’s like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop on his head.”

Jaimie knew about the surgery. Last winter he’d gone next door with his father to shovel the driveway and the Bendham’s walk after a snowstorm. Theo said that in Maine, they’d use snow shovels, but heavy snowfall was rare in Kansas City, Missouri. Instead, they used garden shovels to clear the driveway and shivered in the surprising cold.

“Weather patterns are changing,” Theo complained, “even from when I was a kid I see a big change. The meteorologist’s predictions can’t be depended upon anymore. With climate change, the scientists say we can expect crazy storms, droughts, flooding and worse as the world heats up. I know it doesn’t feel hotter today, but more heat means more evaporation which means more precipitation, so more killer storms and tornadoes. Seems like governments can’t do anything besides blow things up anymore. Used to be, a debate would end. Now the arguments go on forever and the big problems never get solved.”
 

When they were done clearing the walk, father and son stepped inside the Bendham’s house to ask if the old couple needed groceries. Every lamp had a lacy bit of cloth under it. The house had a smell Jaimie associated with the dwellings of old people. Thinking of it brought back boiled cabbage doused in lavender queasiness. Perfect recall is more a curse than a gift.

Fresh from the hospital, Mr. Bendham lay on a flowery couch, a jug of green juice on a TV tray beside him. He was the most chatty Jaimie had seen him, like he was just back from an adventure and anxious to repeat it before he’d forgotten anything. Later, the boy looked up the words “retropubic prostatectomy”. Then he looked it up on the Internet. The boy started eating more tomatoes after watching a YouTube video of the surgery.
 

“Al was in such a rush to get his checkup,” Mrs. Bendham said, “but I don’t know when we’ll get any results. Did you hear? There are a lot of doctors and nurses who are refusing to report to work. When we were there, the hospital was packed with people, but I didn’t see many white coats. There was a lot of coughing going on and the triage nurse told everyone with a fever to go home.”

Jack wasn’t standing close to Mrs. Bendham. It was as if they were calling back and forth across a wide stream. Still, Jaimie noticed his mother take another step back.
 

“A few years ago, the government tried to get the doctors and nurses to sign a pledge to go to work if there was ever a pandemic,” his mother said. “As I remember, they refused. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

“It’s all over the radio now,” Mrs. Bendham said. Half the callers are saying they should get back where they’re needed and the doctors are saying that for this to blow over, everybody should stay home. They are doctors, so I think they should go to work. Whatever risk there is, they chose it.”

“Yeah, but their husbands and wives and sons and daughters didn’t choose that risk.”

Mrs. Bendham seemed about to speak but thought better of it.

“I should get back to the garden,” Jack said.

“You’ve bitten off quite a bit of yard there. What are you planting, Jacqueline?”

“Oh, lots of flowers and green things,” she tossed back over her shoulder. “I’ve decided to take this time to work on my green thumb.”

That was the second lie Jaimie heard his mother speak.

At the end of the world and miles away

J
aimie retreated to the books laid out on his bed. He leafed through the pages, comparing the new one from the library to the thick, old one his father bought at a yard sale. His father had reinforced the binding with gray duct tape. Until the Sutr Virus came, his life had been regimented. The doctors said he would do better in school if he knew what to expect. Now no one knew what to expect and so, very little was required of him. Jaimie disappeared into the words on the page, surrounding himself with alphabetized columns and walls. There was no boredom. Only hunger, sleep and the need to go to the bathroom could drag him from Word World.

Sometimes he looked into one word and the richness of another word waiting nearby would pull him in to taste its curves and softness — words with more than one s or m often felt that way in his mouth.

Jaimie closed his eyes and pointed at a random page of the thickest dictionary. His finger found
cacophony
. To the Greeks, the word connoted not merely a harsh sound, but something evil. In medicine, it referred to an altered state of voice. In music, a combination of discordant sounds. School had often been a cacophony for Jaimie, but he could not detect evil. The ambient sounds in his classroom had been more like the musical definition, loud at times, but organized around lesson plans, bells and learning new things.

Next to
cacophony
,
cacoplastic
waited. The term referred to pathology, “susceptible to a low degree of organization.” Since the Sutr Virus, the neighborhood had become quiet. It was certainly much quieter than the bedlam his classroom could descend to, but the quiet was more disturbing. He saw no one on the sidewalk in front of his house and traffic on his once busy suburban drive was rare.
 

The Greeks were wrong, Jaimie decided. It was the quiet that held evil. He couldn’t see them, but he suspected everyone was hiding in their homes, waiting to see what came next.
“It’s like everyone’s holding their breath,” his father remarked at breakfast. Jaimie recognized the phrase as an idiom he’d heard before, but he still didn’t understand it. One could only hold his breath for so long and then, if the Sutr Virus’s greasy black wasps invaded your energy field, what could one do but breathe them in and feel the aura drain of light?

Jaimie dismissed the thought and delved further into the big dictionary. He got stuck on some words. Many times he could puzzle out definitions but it wasn’t clear to him how they could be used in an actual sentence. He chased the trail of definitions, going from one word he didn’t understand to the next, skipping around the dictionary.
 

Happening on curious root words in his big dictionary, he switched to his little red book:
The Guide to Latin Phrases
. Latin appealed to Jaimie because the dead language’s phrases were still alive:
veritas simplex oratio est
.
The language of truth is simple
.
 

The entries were so descriptive, Latin explained things people wouldn’t think about otherwise, the opposite of opaque idioms. The little red book held instructions in thinking that altered the world and gave it clarity. When he held the book, his mind stood strong, without cacophony. His Latin phrase dictionary — each phrase a concept and a poem, too — showed him how other people thought, if they thought clearly.

Sine loco et anno
leapt off the page at Jaimie.
Without place and date
. Since everyone went into hiding, location and time didn’t matter anymore. It was one of the subtle things the plague had brought, slowing everything down, reducing each day to necessity. If death was existence without movement, living under the shadow of the plague was something like death. The disease brought the world’s clock to a halt. The quiet gave people time to think. They looked up from their work and paused to consider what they were if they weren’t their jobs. For many, the answer would be disturbing.

Jaimie frequently returned to the word
dirigo
. It means
I direct
or
I guide
or
I lead the way
. The book told him it was the motto of Maine, the state where his grandfather, Papa Spence, lived on a farm. The intent of the Latin word was to explain that God was in charge of everything. However, the people of Maine generally assumed their motto meant they stood in control of their destiny and “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” If time and place no longer meant anything in the face of Sutr, perhaps the people of what used to be Maine had already let go of that conceit.

No one was in charge. The world had become cacoplastic.
 

* * *
 

The siege was harder for Anna. Book glue held Jaimie together while the television tore her apart. Dr. Karen Glass and Franklin Jones died in front of her eyes.

Dr. Glass reported from India on the outbreak. She died in a huge tent — like a circus top, but filthy green — surrounded by hundreds of corpses arranged in rows of army cots. As she died on international television — the crawl along the bottom of the screen read: LIVE. She was immortalized on film with her last ratcheting breath. Anna watched it, tears rolling down her cheeks, whispering, “I watched her report…yesterday. She seemed fine just yesterday! She seemed
fine
!”

A sound technician, a pretty brown woman wearing khakis and boots, held the correspondent’s limp body, crying and kissing Dr. Glass’s white forehead and mouth.
 

“Karen! Oh, Karen!” she said, over and over.
 

The sound was muffled. Wind whipped at the microphone. The thick audio feed somehow made the scene more real.
 

“That woman must have loved her so much,” Anna said. “It’s suicide, kissing her bare face like that. She’ll get Sutr next!”

Jack watched the screen with her daughter. “I never guessed Dr. Karen Glass was a lesbian.”

“Mother!”

“What? I’m just saying I didn’t know. Did you know?”

“It’s not supposed to matter, Mom.”
 

“I-I’m not saying it does matter. I just…I think that’s the cameraman coughing. I wonder if her parents are watching this? It would be hell for them to get a double-barrel in the face all at once like this.”

“Mom. Stop talking.”

Jaimie emerged from his bedroom, lured downstairs by hunger and curiosity about what was happening on television. He found Anna in front of the television, a bag of cookies forgotten in one hand, a cookie in the other hand arrested in the air halfway to her mouth.
 

“The anchorman has it, too,” Anna said.
 

Franklin Jones brought the crisis into focus. His death was more than a passing distraction from all the bad news about the economy. Jones had been the daytime anchor of the biggest all-news, all-the-time network on American television. When Theo and Jack wanted to know what was going on in the world, they listened to Canadian radio or the BBC, but they turned to American television channels for video.

Jones was a tall man with thick blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He had been a model in fashion magazines when he was younger. Sunlight and middle-age had cooked his skin rugged and made him look more intelligent. He no longer looked like the thin boy with a vacant stare.
 

Jaimie didn’t pay much attention to television news programs, but Jones’s accent captured him. Even through the television, his voice rolled out across the living room and the boy watched the sound waves break around him as the newsman spoke. The color was a rich blue but the edge in his vowels made sharp white mountain peaks. Jack loved his voice, too. She said he was British via Vermont.

He sat behind the anchor desk eulogizing Dr. Karen Glass’s sacrifice. She “served her nation and the truth,” Jones said.
 

Jaimie looked up from his Latin phrase book. He paid closer attention to the anchor when he noticed the white peaks were gone from his voice. The edges around his tone were softer and weaker.
 

Jones lost his place and began the same sentence again. He stopped. “We’re going to take a break now and go to commercial.” He put his hand to his ear, but the camera stayed on him. He was fumbling with his earpiece when he went to the floor. Muffled voices shouted off-screen.