Dead Earth: The Green Dawn (9 page)

Jubal had the sudden urge to blow the smoke
off the barrel of his gun, like an old-time movie cowboy, but then
thought better of it. He barely understood what he was doing; it
was as if some cold, primitive part of himself was taking command
of his actions. “Bullseye,” was all he said.

“Jubal, are you losing it on me?” Fiona said,
sitting down on the passenger seat with the shotgun propped between
her legs. “I need you.”

“Shoot ’em in the head. They go right down.
Plop.”

Jubal knew he shouldn’t be acting like this,
that he was freaking Fiona out a little, but he just couldn’t help
it. Maybe he’d feel like his old self after a rest.

“I’ll get the additional weapons, then let’s
go home, Fee. We need to plan shit out.”

Fiona slammed her door closed without
answering.

Jubal turned towards the sheriff’s office,
saying, “Oooooh-kay,” under his breath.

He went inside and collected the weapons. He
brought them out and threw them in the back seat of the
cruiser.

Again behind the steering wheel, he flipped on
the car and revved the engine. “It’s okay Fee. We’re going home
now.”

He put the car into drive and sped off down
the street.

“Look out, Jubal. You’re going to run
over...”

With a thump and a bump, Jubal drove over
Renee and continued on.

“Dead bitch.”

“Jubal?”

“It’s okay, Fee. Everything’s going to be
okay now. I can feel it,” Jubal said.

He even smiled.

They carried all the weapons into his
mother’s house, laying them on the coffee table, and locked the
doors and windows.

“I have got to sit down and rest,” Fiona
said, plopping down onto the couch.

“I’ll get you a glass of water. Be right
back.”

Jubal returned with two glasses of ice water.
He pushed aside the shotguns and set them on the coffee table.
“Some wedding we’re going to have, huh?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hey, we could have Renee bring the finger
food,” he said and immediately regretted it. Fiona kicked the
coffee table, spilling both water glasses and knocking one of the
shotguns to the floor. Jubal hadn’t engaged the safety of either
Mossberg and he prepared himself for a blast that never came.

He picked the gun up off the floor and heard
the slam of the bathroom door.

You’re an idiot.

He just had to show his fiancée how calm and
cool he had become, how he was dealing with this unholy crisis like
a wisecracking movie character. He wanted her to know he was strong
and he would protect her, because if he could convince Fiona, maybe
he could convince himself. And maybe he could erase from his mind
the image of Damon Ortega’s head bursting like a melon.

He cursed himself under his breath. He was 22
years old, shouldered with huge responsibilities, and he still
acted like a kid.

Jubal stood outside the bathroom door for
several minutes. He expected to hear Fiona’s sobs, but she made no
sound.

Finally, he tapped his knuckle on the
door.

“Fee?”

She didn’t answer.

“Fee, I’m sorry. I...I’m an ass. It’s so hard
to act like I’m strong when I’m so goddamned scared.” He swallowed.
That had been a tough thing for him to say. Now that he had, he
felt better. Fiona loved him. She would accept him just as he was.
After all, she had known him longer than almost anyone.

Actually, he realized, she had known him as
long as anybody left alive.

“Fiona, did you hear me? I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

The voice was very small and came from a
place near his knees. He pictured her sitting on the bathroom floor,
her head against the door.

Jubal leaned against the wall and slid down
until he was sitting by his side of the bathroom door.

“I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just
stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. You’re a guy,” she said,
as if that explained everything. Jubal supposed it did.

He pressed one side of his face against the
door, hoping it was near Fiona’s. “Fee, we’ll get through
this.”

“Don’t.”

“Just listen—”

“No, Jubal, you listen to me.” Her voice
sounded on the edge of tears. Before yesterday, Jubal had seen
Fiona cry two or three times in fifteen years. Now the sight and
sound of her sorrow had grown too familiar. “I know you want to
save me. To save Serenity, I suppose. But pay attention to what I
have to say. Are you listening?”

“Yeah.” He pressed harder into the cool wood
of the door, dreading what she was going to say, yet needing to
hear it.

“You can’t save me. You can’t save this town.
You need to leave. Just get in the car and drive somewhere else.
Try to find a place where this disease hasn’t reached.”

“What? Fiona...no. We’ll stick it out
together. I’m not leaving you.”

“You have to, Jubal.” She spoke slowly and
clearly, as if addressing a child. Somehow that made her words
sting even worse.

“It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

Through the two inches of oak, Jubal heard
her sigh.

“Don’t lie to me, Jubal. You’ve seen the
blister on my neck, and now there’s one on my leg. Whatever this
is, I have it. I’m sick.”

“No!” Now he was the one who was near tears.
Again.

“I know it’s hard to hear, baby. But it will
go easier if you accept it.”

Jubal turned the doorknob. It was locked.
Still, he rattled it several times.

“No. You’re not going to die. We don’t know
anything about this thing. Maybe it doesn’t kill everybody. Look at
me, Fiona. I feel fine.”

“I know,” she said. “And I think you’re
right. Maybe it doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Like any
other disease, it progresses at different rates in different
people.”

He latched on to that. “See? You might—”

“And some are probably immune to it. I think
one of them might be you.”

He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

”Jubal?”

His first thought was one that would haunt him
for the rest of his life.

It won’t kill me. I’m going to live.

He felt the guilt slam down as if it actually
had weight.

“You can’t know that,” he managed to get
out.

What if it was true? What if he was immune to
this awful plague? Would life without his friends and family be
worth a good goddamn? Could he go on without Fiona?

“I know it, Jubal.” She began to cough, and
while it wasn’t as wet or drawn out as the sounds Renee and Damon
had made, it wasn’t a sign of good health either. When the coughing
fit ended, Fiona said, “I don’t know how to explain it, but
something is changing inside me. I can tell you’re fine. You stand
out like a splash of color in a black and white drawing.”

Jubal decided that Fiona must have a fever.
She was starting to talk crazy. Of course that meant the stuff
about him being immune was just bullshit. The brief disappointment
he felt was enough to tighten the screws on the guilt.

He had to get her out of the bathroom and put
her to bed. Maybe get her some Tylenol to bring down the fever. He
thought there were antibiotics in the bathroom from that ear
infection his mother had suffered through last year.

“It would have been a nice wedding,” she
said.

Jubal stood up and moved to the small curio
cabinet his mother kept in the hall.

“Still will be,” he said.

“I would have loved Egypt.”

The airline tickets were in the desk in his
bedroom, but Jubal couldn’t dwell on that now. He felt like a
mountain climber hanging by one hand over a bottomless precipice.
If he allowed himself to think about everything that was going
on—and how it was likely to end—then he just might think about
putting the business end of one of the shotguns in his mouth. He
could never do that to Fiona.

“Egypt will still be there when we get to it,
Fee.”

He opened the drawer at the bottom of the
cabinet and felt around.

“Sure, it’ll be there,” she said. “Full of
plague victims and the dead army.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Where are you going, Jube?”

He knew she meant why had he moved away from
the bathroom door, but he couldn’t help but think of the question
from a larger perspective.

Where was he going? Where Fiona was. That’s
all that was important now. He had to keep them alive for another
day, another hour.

His finger touched something thin and
metallic.

Got it.

He removed the bobby pin, black and shiny in
the hall light. His mother had kept it in the drawer after a couple
of moody pubescent episodes on Jubal’s part.

“Get away from the door, Fee.”

“What, you’re gonna shoot it open?”

The bobby pin had been bent into one long
metal strand. Jubal slipped one end through the small opening in
the doorknob and felt a satisfying click as the lock
disengaged.

He opened the door and saw Fiona standing in
the dark bathroom. Illuminated only by the hall light, she looked
as sallow and insubstantial as a ghost. He thought he saw the
shadows of small eruptions across her forehead and cheeks. He
didn’t look too closely.

“Where did you learn to pick locks?”

“I used to lock myself in here when I was a
kid. It’s how Ma and Dad got me out. Besides, it’s not a lock
that’s really designed to keep anybody out.”

“I never had someone pick a lock for me
before.”

“Come on,” he said, offering his hand. “Let’s
go to bed.”

She smiled. It was a fleeting expression, gone
as quickly as it appeared. “That’s the best offer I’ve had all
day.”

And the rest of the day, they made slow,
passionate love. Jubal made a point of caressing Fiona’s neck to
show he was not disgusted by her illness—to show that despite it
all, he really cared about her and always would. But after a while,
he no longer had to make a point of it. He was lost in the depths
of a love so strong that nothing mattered but each other’s pleasure
and happiness.

Sometime in the middle of the night, long
after they’d fallen asleep, Jubal vaguely registered Fiona getting
up and going down the hallway to the bathroom, coughing the whole
way. Then he drifted back to sleep, afloat on the memory of their
beautiful lovemaking.

When he awoke, Jubal looked over at Fiona,
who had scooted to the other side of the bed. All he could see of
her was a strand of hair sticking out from beneath the covers. He
smiled, patted her bottom through the blanket and got out of bed.
He wanted to surprise her with breakfast so he slipped on his robe
and tiptoed out of the room.

As he scrambled eggs and brewed coffee in the
little kitchen, Jubal wondered what their next steps would be. They
could not go north to Carlsbad; that was for sure. Maybe they could
go east through Texas or south into Mexico. Maybe the farther away
they got from Serenity, the better Fiona would feel. Maybe there
was hope somewhere, after all.

He set two plates of hot eggs on the table
and poured two cups of coffee. He set one cup next to a plate of
eggs and carried the other down the hallway towards the
bedroom.

“Breakfast is served, my princess,” he
called.

Fiona didn’t move.

“Lazy old cow,” Jubal said jokingly.

He went to her bedside and whipped the
blanket off her head. He nudged Fiona’s shoulder with his
finger.

He stopped.

Her shoulder felt wrong. And she wasn’t
moving.

Jubal dropped the coffee. The hot liquid
splashed across his bare feet, but he didn’t feel it. He placed
three fingers against Fiona’s blistered neck.

“No...”

He took her shoulders and shook her hard. Her
head lolled from side to side and back and forth, but she did not
awaken. He did this for some time before he finally made himself
stop.

That’s when he noticed the empty vial of his
mother’s sleeping pills on the nightstand next to a glass of
water.

Jubal snatched the glass and sniffed it. Not
water. Vodka.

She must have taken them sometime before he
woke up.

“Wake, up, Fee, baby!” he shouted into her
unresponsive face, knowing deep down that it was no use.
“Please?”

Tears flooded his eyes; he could barely see.
They spattered against his dead lover’s face.

Jubal took the pill vial and threw it across
the room, where it ricocheted off the wall. Beneath the vial had
been a small square of the scratch paper his mother kept next to
the phone in the kitchen. There was writing on it.

Jubal read through tears:

Baby,

I didn’t want to burden you with watching me
slowly die and turn into one of those things. I wanted us to end on
a happy moment that we both could treasure forever, no matter where
we were.

I dreamed again about the dead army last
night and their leader in red. Their leader is not one of them. He
is not dead. And he’s not from here. He’s from a darker world. I’m
not sure how I know this, but I do. It’s as real and true as my
feelings for you.

I hope this helps in some way, but I can’t
imagine how. I wish that you would read this and flee. Go far from
here.

I’m sorry it had to be like this, my sweet,
sweet Jubal. But I had been thinking about it and knew it was the
only way for me—and you.

Please forgive me. And I’ll see you again in
some happy place.

I’ll be waiting.

All my love,

Fiona

Jubal pressed the note to his lips, dripping
tears on it, and placed it on the nightstand.

He reached down and drew the blanket up over
Fiona’s face.

Picking his clothes off the floor, he put them
on slowly as if performing a sacred ritual. Then he took Fiona’s
note and slid it into his uniform’s shirt pocket, over his heart,
patting it after he was finished.

He went to the living room and strapped on
his Glock. He arranged the shotguns neatly on the coffee table and
stacked the ammo next to them.