This Plague of Days, Season Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (27 page)

Anna looked at her mother. “Did she…?”

“Methinks she spoke in rhyme — ” Theo began.

“Bad rhyme,” Jack said.

“Which suggests we’re in for a very odd time,” Theo finished.

“She’s a loon,” Mrs. Bendham said.

A slow droning chant emanated from the tent. Hundreds of people were singing “
Om
!”
 

“What the hell is that?” Mrs. Bendham said.

“It’s a meditation,” Anna replied. “
Om
is the sound the whole world would make if you heard all sounds as one sound.”

Her mother looked at her, eyebrows raised. Anna shrugged. “I bailed out of yoga after one class, but that’s what it is. It’s supposed to calm your mind.”

“Anybody feel calm?” Mrs. Bendham asked.

“Look along the far edge of the tent,” Jack said. “There’s a line, but they have portable toilets!”

“Then let’s give these wackos a chance. I haven’t spent a penny all day,” Mrs. Bendham said. She climbed out of the back of the van and made for the bathroom stiffly.

“I’ll go in and see what this is all about,” Jack said. “You guys stay with the van.”

Anna gave her mother a head start and then shook Jaimie awake. “You stay with the van and don’t budge, Ears. I’m not going to miss this. No offense, but I need to spend some time with more people.”

Jaimie looked to his father. “I’ll stay with you,” Theo said. “I promise. But come outside. Let’s get you some fresh air.”
 

The boy reached between his feet and held his large dictionary in both hands. He considered opening it, but instead followed his father to the van’s rear bumper. In the multicolored glow from the tent city and shifting moonlight, they could easily make out a tight cluster of twenty-four freshly-dug graves in the bare field beyond the cars.

Theo sat on the bumper and leaned heavily against the van, his head tipped back. The sky ran black with rivulets of racing clouds so the moon came and went. “Looks like the night our house exploded, doesn’t it? Just the thought of our home going up in flames…it makes me bone tired.”

Theo looked around.

“This doesn’t look like so bad a place. I’d suggest we rest some more, but I can’t see the stars. This is a lonely place without the stars. If I could see the stars, I’d lay me down in one of those graves and escape into the deepest sleep. But we need the stars to keep watch, don’t we?”
 

* * *

The chant from the tent grew louder. Amid the range of the chant, both spoken and sung, a tangent of voices, all sopranos, went off on a shorter burst of
Oms
. It came out as a birdlike trill. A group of men with bass voices built longer notes, as if to answer the soprano chorus with a deep chant that explored the
Om
further and balanced it out. Tenors rose and fell next in a rolling chant.
 

Jaimie closed his eyes. He had never seen the ocean, but it was easy to imagine the
Om
as storm waves.

Chaos that isn’t chaos,
Jaimie thought.
A terrible beauty, dangerous and calming at the same time.
He liked the word
Om
.
 

Theo closed his eyes, too, listening as the crowd articulated variations of the
Om
. The choir returned to one harmonized voice briefly and then broke off into segments once more.

Banshees,
Jaimie thought. He resisted the urge to open the dictionary in his hands and chose to listen instead.

“It’s been lonely without the voices of strangers, Jaimie. We’re each the center of our private maelstroms, but it’s nice to hear the voices in the wind. It’s reassuring to think we aren’t alone.

“I know I’ve said it a thousand times, that you should talk more. By the time you turned three, I was begging and bribing and threatening you, trying to get you to say ‘Daddy.’ You drove me crazy. For a long time, I thought you must be a punishment, you know, for killing Kenny. After that, I decided it was easier on me to forget about God and punishments altogether.”

Jaimie did not answer but the boy allowed his gaze to meet his father’s eyes.
 

 
Theo shifted his weight on the bumper, trying to get comfortable. “Whenever you talk, you seem to have something useful to say. That’s what sets you apart.” he added. “So now I think, when you want to talk, you will. No pressure necessary. I do love the sound of your voice, son. And I’m proud of you. Maybe we made things too comfortable for you. All it took is a little flu pandemic to help pull you out of your shell.”

Jaimie walked out into the tall grass and let his fingers caress the soft fronds that reached up to him.
 

A little girl appeared beside Jaimie. She looked like she stood under a tall pile of curly, black hair. He glanced at the child quickly and then turned back to the low mounds of dark earth at his feet. He could feel the dirt — fresh-turned, loose and shifting under his weight — but in the darkness, each grave was an empty black rectangle.

In one hand, the girl held a wind-up flashlight. She hugged a toy rabbit under her other arm. The moon emerged from behind the clouds, illuminating the field at the edge of the impromptu parking lot. She tucked the flashlight into a pocket and reached up to hold Jaimie’s hand.
 

“I’m from South Dakota,” she said. “My cat is buried right there,” she added, “in Canada. His name was Milkpig. We ate him and then we put the bones there. I miss him.”

“Right there, huh? Sorry about that, kiddo,” Theo said.
 

His father often called Jaimie ‘kiddo’ when he was that age, too.

“My grandfather is buried under Milkpig,” the girl said. “We didn’t eat him, though.”
 

When she sighed, Jaimie guessed that was an expression of regret. The girl’s hand was soft and tiny in his palm. She squeezed Jaimie’s hand and he squeezed back. She stayed a moment more and then pulled away.
 

Jaimie watched her take out the wind up flashlight, enliven the beam by whirring the handle around and around. Her light bobbed up and down, dimming until she disappeared amongst glowing tents under waving strings of Christmas lights.

The van was cramped, but outside in the crisp air? The boy could stretch out. Jaimie lay amid the graves, listening to the voices from the big tent sing their one-word song. Theo lay beside his son.

* * *

From the road came the loud rumble of a pair of motorcycles escorting another vehicle. A strobe of red, white and blue appeared over the hill. A moment later, a police car slowly wound its way among the parked cars, its broken muffler growling.

The men on the motorcycles stayed close to the cruiser. Each man held a short shotgun and pointed the way with their weapons. They directed the driver to park in a spot not far from the Spencer’s van. As soon as the police cruiser parked, the bikers headed back to the road.

The letters ‘KCMO’ were painted clearly down the side of the Interceptor. A bright yellow trailer bumped along behind the cruiser.
 

Had Jaimie stood, he would have recognized that trailer. Had he been able to understand the heavily stylized font painted on its side, he would have read:
Mere Entertainments.

* * *
 

Jaimie closed his eyes to the sky’s torrent. He listened to the
Om
and let his mind reach down, past the rotting bodies beneath him in the freshly turned dirt. Jaimie felt for the turning of the earth. At the mid-latitudes, he’d read that the earth spins at eight-hundred miles per hour. Even so, Jaimie could only barely feel the planet’s subtle rotation.

The earth spun Jaimie back into sleep. As his son fell into new dreams, Theo faded, too.

The police cruiser’s door closed with a hollow
thunk!

Lieutenant Francis Carron stalked through the dark toward the tent. He passed the sleeping boy within a dozen paces.

E
ACH
ONE
AND
EVERYTHING
IS
ABOUT
SOMETHING
OTHER

T
he boy waited in Dr. Sinjin-Smythe’s dreams. He sat cross-legged and slumped in a birch forest, eyes closed.

At first, the virologist assumed the boy was meditating, but he slept. As the doctor floated nearby, the trees drew closer. They weren’t simply birch bark. Skeins of black text wrapped around the paper of each white trunk.
 

When Sinjin-Smythe tried to read the words, he came gently to earth. He found himself standing barefoot in cool moss before the boy. To his left, impenetrable Latin wrapped around a trunk like a coiled snake.

When he leaned on a tree to his right, a low voice came to him, quoting
Much Ado About Nothing
. “They that touch pitch will be defiled.” The words arrived like a low electric current humming through his brain. Each word had a unique shape and taste and color. Surprised, Sinjin-Smythe stepped back but found himself compelled to touch another tree, tentatively, with both bare hands.

This time, the message came from
Macbeth
. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” The tree bark sliced him and the doctor pulled his hands back too late. He expected blood, but no. His thumbs tingled like he’d stuck them in an electrical socket.

“Tingling thumbs,” the boy said. “A bad omen in Shakespeare’s day.”

“You live in a forest of words?”

“I live between meanings.” The boy opened his eyes and looked up. “I love Latin, its concision and the way the words feel. My father is the one who loves Shakespeare.”

The doctor saw himself in the mirrored eyes. Was this how the boy saw him? A weak, terrified man who didn’t know what to do and couldn’t do anything right? Or could the doctor change his reflection? The zombies terrified him, of course, but he hadn’t expected such shame at his paralyzing fear.

“Someone’s chasing me, too, doctor. Powerful forces are coming together against anyone who is still human.”

“I know.”

“You should hurry to join the fight, Craig.”

The boy uttered a Latin phrase. Though the doctor somehow understood the individual words, put together, it made no sense to him.

In the lucid dream (or did this qualify as a vision?) Sinjin-Smythe saw a dark figure pass behind the boy amid the forest’s shadows. The boy didn’t see the thing stalking him. Though the doctor could not see its face, white fangs shone in the black silhouette.
 

The doctor pointed and shouted, “Look out! Turn around! Watch out behind you! It’s there! There!”

“It’s merely a shade here. When I go back, he’ll be waiting. ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams,’” Jaimie said. “
Hamlet
got it right. I’m safe in my forest of words. This isn’t the bad dream. The nightmare is your world.”

“We all want to curl up warm under a blanket with a good book when a storm rages outside, but my world and yours
is
the same, isn’t it?”

“Not really. I prefer this place, warm under the blanket.”

A black blanket decorated with shining stars appeared in the air behind the boy. It hovered for a moment and settled over the boy’s shoulders as if placed by invisible hands. Jaimie sighed softly.

Sinjin-Smythe stared, his mind reeling and rebelling at what he witnessed.

“The enemy is so determined because they’re sure they are right,” Jaimie said. “Stupid people often win just because they’re louder, will say anything and, most important, they are
certain
. Stupid people
adore
certainty. That’s the danger in being more intelligent and patient. People who allow nuance lose debates. Smart people lose wars all the time.”

“Are you saying I’ve already lost the war against the virus?”

“No. I’m saying you haven’t even joined the right war yet. Thank you for your warning about the man in the shadows, Doctor. I’ll go back and deal with him.
Mirabilia!”

Wonders,
the virologist thought.
Mirabilia means wonders!
How do I know that?

The boy heard his unspoken words. The mirrors locked on the doctor. “We’re all changing in its grip. You understand because you rise to answer the call. In the war for the future, only the deniers will remain deaf and dumb.

“People ate themselves to death and when the heart attacks came, it was a shock but not a surprise. People lived in Tornado Alley but didn’t move. Instead, they kept rebuilding until the next tornado and the next. The power of denial is an awesome thing. Humans would have denied the oceans’ rise right up until the tide took their own houses away.”

“You don’t think much of us, do you?”

“Not so. I love some of you. Others? The others make it difficult to love them. I’m not here for everyone. Some prefer their delusions to my illusions. Life will give them contusions.” He smiled. “Not everyone is worth fighting for, Craig, even if they haven’t done anything wrong. Being innocent isn’t enough to save anyone. To win, you have to take action and you have to do what’s right.”

“And if I do what’s right, I’ll survive?”

“I can’t see the future, Craig. We have to make the future. We’re manufacturing it now. That’s what Shiva’s doing, too. If you want something different from her vision, make your future. But to merely survive? Aim higher than that or Shiva will be right when she calls you a slave.”

“You want to know why I’m the messenger. All I know is, the Way of Things chose me.”

“Why?”

“People who don’t talk too much perceive more, so there’s that.”

“And the Way of Things chose me?”

Jaimie seemed to ignore the question. “Funny how call and cull are so close in sound, isn’t it? And how a call can lead to a cull? And the word
warn
contains the word
war
. And the double meaning of dumb…well, never mind. Now, please heed my invitation. You’re needed in Iceland, but come quickly.”