This Plague of Days, Season Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (24 page)

* * *

Jaimie watched his mother’s energies ebb as mile after mile dropped behind them. The tires hummed on the pavement as they progressed north and the terrain rolled and dipped and became more treed.

At every west-east junction, the way was blocked by abandoned tanks, empty 18-wheelers flat on their tires or cars jammed from ditch to ditch. If the refugees in those cars had sought medical attention, they died out here before they found it. Each car they saw was a glassed coffin.

Were there survivors beyond the blocked roads? Had they staggered east, trying to pick their way through the tangle? How many miles could a person walk in a day, climbing between fenders? How far out could the metal blockade reach?

“America,” Theo said, “is an east-west country. Everyone travelled east-west and far and wide. Families spread out over the last couple of generations. There was nothing for me in Maine. I can’t believe I’m going back like this.”

Focussed on the road ahead, Jack said nothing, but Jaimie listened to his father.

“Imagine those communities with nuclear families where everybody stayed put and worked the organic farm and didn’t go to California to be movie stars or east to make it big in New York. Even in New York, there are probably lots of families who sat tight and stuck together in their neighborhoods. Maybe they’re dealing with threats of cholera while we deal with the dangers of the road, so all the stark, raving terror evens out.”

Only the way north welcomed them. Jaimie watched his mother yawn and squint and grip the wheel. She looked as fierce as the dogs that chased them, but she would not give up her place in the driver’s seat.

“In a disaster, people look for problems they can solve and find what little they can control,” Theo whispered to Jaimie. “For your mother, that wheel is
it
.”
 

Farther north, they saw the leavings of lynchings. Women and men alike hung naked from overpasses by ropes and twisted bedsheets. Their crimes were carved into their bodies. The knife writing was opaque cryptography to Jaimie as they passed under the bodies.

However, if opportunistic birds didn’t get in the way and if the flesh was not rotted through or torn too badly to decipher, Anna read aloud: “Looter…thief…Adulterer…looter…looter…killer…carrier…looter…thief…carrier…blasphemer.”

The bodies hung so low over the road, Jack had to slow to a crawl to make sure the dead’s legs did not break the windshield. Many travellers had come this way, so the flesh had been torn away from their feet and legs leaving only white bone. The deads’ shinbones and broken toes dragged along the van’s roof, a grim skeletal tapdance.

After a long silence, Anna began to weep quietly. “Where is everybody? This doesn’t make sense.”

“Dead,” Mrs. Bendham said, her mouth full of a mealy apple.

Anna focussed on her mother, ignoring the old woman. “The math doesn’t work. We’re alive. All of us. Douglas Oliver was an old man and he survived the Sutr Virus.”

“My Al was an old man and he died of it,” Mrs. Bendham replied.

“There should be more people!”

“It’s true, by the law of averages, more of you should be dead,” Theo agreed. “However, weird exceptions do happen. I remember a story. One fellow was almost killed by a bomb at the Boston Marathon. He went home to Texas the next day and boom! He was almost killed again, this time by an exploding fertilizer plant in Texas.” Theo looked to his son and reached out to ruffle his hair. “We know all about the strange and unusual but possible, don’t we?”

“That’s not what worries me,” Jack said finally.

“What could there
possibly
be to worry about, I wonder?” Mrs. Bendham said.

“We aren’t getting to Maine this way. We just passed Lansing. We’re headed to Canada.”

To their left, they spotted a black bear clawing at something in a field. A baby’s car seat lay nearby.

H
E
WATCHES
,
BUT
WHAT
GOOD
DOES
THAT
DO

G
us was at the far end of a long walk when he saw the ship’s smokestack above the South Street Viaduct.
 

The movement caught his eye first. He’d learned to watch for dangerous survivors, but he usually saw more rats than people. New York rats were big and bold and well-fed. There had been as many rats as people in New York before Sutr. Now there were many, many more.

The survivors were here, he knew. He often saw men and women at open windows. They fanned themselves and prayed for an end to the punishing spring heat.

Just before the ship struck land, he heard them, too. From blocks around, New Yorkers ran toward the ship. They saw the crash coming and they ran to help.

His first thought was how tall and out of place the cruise liner was. Even travelling at full speed, the illusion of the oncoming ship was not that it was speeding. It appeared to
loom
.

The cruise ship could have docked safely on the east side of the island beside 12
th
Avenue. Pier 11 was much smaller, meant for the East River Ferry. However, the ship did not dock. It plowed. The ship’s momentum carried it forward, first with a rumble and then to the sound of screeching and crumpling metal. The noise made Gus grit his teeth.
 

As he ran forward, he could make out the name of the ship. The hull said
Mars
.

Like the planet,
he thought.

When he told the story in the years to come, he’d lie. He’d tell his rapt listeners that his first thought was of the God of War.

The ship came to rest at the South Street Viaduct. He expected quiet, but he was wrong. New Yorkers kept shouting to each other and came on the run. An irritating alarm sounded from somewhere on the ship.

“Like the world’s biggest digital alarm clock going off,” he’d report later.

And then the ship’s passengers ran out to meet their would-be rescuers. That’s what he thought they were. Some leaped to South Street from the
Mars
’ upper deck. The rest boiled out of holes in the hull. “Like ants from a kicked anthill,” Gus would say. “Like angry fire ants.”

“People call ’em zombies. I always thought of zombies as slow and slow-witted. Now, maybe they couldn’t pass an exam, but as soon as those monsters got off that boat, they didn’t hesitate.

“The first attack I ever saw, it was four of them. I thought they were fighting over a guy, pulling him back and forth. Maybe they were at first, but as soon as he was on the ground, they tore at him with their teeth.”

Gus stopped in the middle of Wall Street, frozen. He watched the zombies attack, horrified. They were mostly white people, but very disheveled and thin. Their clothes had been fancy once, but now they were dirty and torn. Bewildered, Gus even let out a surprised chuckle when he noticed that many of those feeding on the fallen wore soiled pants. (He always used the word “soiled” with a wink to the parents of the children gathered at his feet.)
 

“They kept pouring out of the
Mars
, but worse, people kept pouring into the street. I didn’t know there were that many people in that end of town. You wouldn’t think so, but maybe people were drawn to all the stored food in the dead restaurants.

“Women and children ran to the ship before I could warn them off. Funny thing about seeing what you don’t expect to see. At first, you go into denial and you think, this can’t be happening. When you rush, your brain’s not hooked up to your eyes right away. The people who ignored me, they ran right into the teeth of the zombie attack.
 

“You have to understand,” Gus would say later, “The crash of the
Mars
was the most exciting thing to happen in a long time. People were tired. There was nothing to do but burn bodies and scrounge and maybe stare at the walls. Maybe you think you’re a homebody, but stick anybody in a small room with their family for months on end waiting to maybe die from the flu? I
guaran-darn-tee
, you run out of conversation. Maybe you even welcome a little danger and excitement. Boy, did we get it that day!”

Gus always skimped on the deeper horrors he’d witnessed. He didn’t mention the children ripped from their mothers’ arms to be devoured in front of them. The kids’ soft bellies were pulled and pried open as easily as delicate, red flower petals.

He saw two disembowelments up close. The horror of the scene wasn’t merely that it happened. It was the joy etched on the faces of the monsters. The Atlantic was their desert. New York was their oasis. When they arrived, they leapt at their victims with such orgiastic joy, it was as if they were dying of thirst and hunger. Instead of water, they came for meat and blood.

Some idiotic listeners always pressed Gus for more details. They wanted him to paint a picture. His haunted look silenced most. If that didn’t shut them up, everyone got quiet and respectful when the tears came.

Tears were Gus’ opening to talk about God. He talked a long time about God’s mercies. With each well-chosen word, he hoped to erase the horrors he’d evoked. He told his audience how God put him in that place at that time to save a family from monsters. He said God made the mother of that family a pilot.
 

“That was how I went from the zombie attack on a Thursday at noon to escaping to Canada in a Cessna seaplane by noon the next day. I’d never been farther than Coney Island before that, but here I am, alive and well by God’s grace.”

The crowd would always murmur and nod, appreciating a good story. Lots of people had zombie stories, but no one else had zombie stories that included crashing cruise liners.

“Occupy Wall Street couldn’t do it. Islamo-fascist Nazis couldn’t do it. The government and courts
wouldn’t
do it. In the end, it was the murderous zombie army from
Mars
that finally brought down Wall Street.”

When they thought he was done, Gus added the kicker. “I saw God that day and he worked through me. He guided me. He came to me like the words to a eulogy.”

Some of the older ones shifted in their seats and looked away, but most eyes were on him, wanting to believe.

“In my panic, I saw things differently. I ran, carrying a child in my arms and guiding the pilot’s family to safety. We ran and hid and ran and hid. But all the way, whenever we ran, I kept seeing the orange
X
s on the doors.

“You’ve all seen them, but I saw a
pattern
. Somehow, by God’s grace, I got it in my head that if I saw three doors in a row with the mark of death? I turned away.
X
is a powerful letter.
X
represents the unknown.
X
marks the spot. Three is a dangerous number. Peter denied Jesus three times. And — ” with a wink, “two’s company but three’s a crowd.”

His audience would smile and look curious and confused. Gus explained the feeling of being guided by an unseen, but sure, hand.

“Imagine yourself running in a panic, panting and exhausted and terrified to stop, or even look behind you, because if you look, monsters might be on your heels and you’re out of gas.”

When he mimed swinging his arms and panting, the children always laughed.

“Now imagine letting streetlights guide your way. If it’s red, turn right. If it’s green, keep going straight! That’s how it was for me, except the electricity was out. No streetlights anymore, so I was guided by the
X
s. I just knew, I mean I was
sure
, those
X
s were meant for me.”

Gus bent his head, pretending humility. “Seeing God’s signs that way? It was like all that death finally meant something. All that misery? All those lives ending? They served a purpose no one could have foreseen. But God knew. God’s high up. God sees the road ahead. All that sacrifice meant I could live if I looked below the gritty surface of tragedy to find the
meaning
of things. Everything means something else if you look at it right.”

His audience usually looked at him like he was a little bit crazy then. That was okay. He’d brought them down and up and now he yanked their comfortable seats in reality out from under their butts.
 

“In those days, I wasn’t the man you know now. I went by the name of Gus: former drug addict, homeless person and third-rate fiddler. The name I never used was my middle name. It’s the name you know me by now: Xavier. When I was running, I knew those
X
s were a sign meant for me. Xavier is a Basque name. It means ‘owns a new house.’ Thanks to God’s mercy and sweet people like you, I do own a new house.”

Now was the time to smile slowly and let them see the beatific spread of it, from ear to ear. He’d tell this story for the rest of his life, but the next line was the most powerful of all.

“Trusting and following those
X
s and that inner voice? I took that family I didn’t know round in a big circle, from hiding place to hiding place, until we were smack back at Pier 11. We found a seaplane my new friend could fly. Follow me, and I’ll take you to God’s promised safety, too.”
 

Then Xavier would pass the collection plate and hope for sugar beets and apples.

His story was a very effective lie.

W
HEN
YOU
TURN
ON
A
SPIT
,
TURNED
INTO
STEW
?

T
he only barrier to the north was in the minds of those bold enough to brave the Mackinac Bridge. Someone had tried to stop the migration to Canada inside the Michigan border.

As the Spencers approached the bridge, each corpse’s state of decay was a clue to a grisly timeline. The skeletons came first.

As they made their way forward, closer to the bridge, the bodies became more filled out and distinct. Clothes were torn. Flesh was rotten and the bodies lay closer together until they became an uninterrupted buffet for gulls to rip and tear and feast upon.