This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (4 page)

The family dug through the afternoon, overturning turf and softening the ground. Jack worked with a clawed hoe, Theo and Anna with spades and the boy with the small trowel. They broke the clumps of grass, taking turns with a new pick axe. After half an hour, they were all shiny and wet with effort. The backyard was the family’s first farm and the first time they had all worked together.

Jack’s anger was a red that dulled to a blue-black bruise the harder she swung the pick. Anna stayed angry red. Theo was yellow but getting greener, like a lime.
 

The color around Jaimie’s hands went from purple to a deep violet. Jaimie decided later that those were the hues of his purest happiness.

Tomorrow's for the promises we'll fail to keep

J
aimie got out of bed and listened at the crack at the bottom of the door. His parents whispered back and forth, but he could hear his sister clearly. “How bad?…How long?” More urgent whispers. Anna stomped up the stairs, passed Jaimie’s bedroom and slammed her door.

When Jaimie got up early the next morning, his parents were dressed in the same clothes from the night before. Both their laptops stood open on the dining room table and Jack had a pad of paper. Jaimie couldn’t read her scrawl, but Jaimie recognized the look of a list, each word or groups of words in a stack.

“I’m taking the day off work,” Theo told Jaimie. “You come with me and you can push the cart and help carry things.”

His mother looked to her husband, her face a question.
 

“He’s sixteen and strong,” Theo said. “We’ll take the van. Give me what you’ve got so far and we’ll go work on that. When Anna gets up, take the other car and fit what you can in it.”

She nodded and ripped several pages off her pad. She held them out to him, but looked in his eyes and didn’t let go of the pages. “Who should I call?”

“Call everyone in the family.”

“Really?”

“Everyone should know. Cliff might not have been able to warn everyone. He and I have had our trouble, but he risked a lot to get the word out to us about what’s really going on. He’d be in big trouble sharing some of those memos, I’m sure.”

“Just family? I have to call Brandy. She’s my best friend.”

“I count Brandy as family. Of course, tell her. It’s not that we keep it a secret from anyone. It’s just prioritizing who gets alerted first.” He looked like he was doing a difficult calculation in his head. “We’ll talk about coworkers later. I’ve called in sick, so we definitely can’t warn any of them yet. ’k?” They kissed quickly and Theo fed Jaimie breakfast at a drive-through. The sausage patty was greasy and smeared the boy’s lips.

His father laughed as he wiped the boy’s face with a napkin, “You’re a shiny little ape.”

Jaimie watched his father’s aura. Theo was shiny, too. A halo of green and violet fire flared around his head as he gently wiped his son’s chin. He caught new interest in the boy’s look. When he finished, Theo asked his son if he had anything to say.

The boy shook his head slightly.
 

“It’s okay, son. When you’re ready.”

Most people wore surgical masks or even carpenter masks and goggles. Some had cloth tied over their faces and the people who wore eyeglasses all seemed to be steamed up so much they maneuvered through the aisles of Target in a fog. A couple people wore winter scarves tied over their faces.

Theo held Jaimie’s hand. The boy stuck close to his side. No one wanted to bump into another person, but it was so busy, the crowd’s press was inevitable. Theo said Jaimie “heeled like a terrier.” Target was too full and only one line was open to a cashier, so they left for the mall’s grocery store.

The shelves weren’t as full as usual and the aisles were also packed. Theo stuffed the shopping list into his shirt pocket and didn’t look at it again. Instead, he grabbed a cart for Jaimie to push while he pulled another. With one hand on his son’s shoulder, he guided Jaimie through the crowd and down the aisles. Instead of looking at what he was buying, Theo swept cans into the cart with one arm.
 

The freezers were almost empty. When Theo looked at the vegetable section he said in a low hiss, “Locusts.”
 

All the milk — regular and powdered — was gone. Down one aisle, Theo jumped up and spotted something. He climbed the shelf to reach a big bottle of hand sanitizer covered in dust at the back, almost out of sight.

At the end of the cracker and snack aisle, a thin old woman in a black dress blocked the way. “You’re taking too much,” she said. Her lined face made Jaimie think of the pictures of witches he’d seen in fairy tale books.

“Excuse me?” Theo said.

“You’re taking too much,” she repeated, and coughed without covering her mouth. She sweated heavily and looked flushed.

“Please,” Theo said softly, but his hand clamped down harder on the boy’s shoulder and Jaimie pushed the cart forward. She gave them a hard look. As they brushed past her, there was an acidic smell that came off her mottled skin. It reminded Jaimie of a dead squirrel that had been run over in front of his house last summer. The old woman glowed with fever.

 
The boy couldn’t take his eyes off her as they pushed on. He thought of witches who kidnapped children, who pushed them into ovens and tricked them into eating poison apples. He watched the black dots, bigger and greasier, swallow up the woman’s reds and yellows. Jaimie could barely see her face, as if the black dress was getting bigger, enveloping her in a thick gauze. When she curled her thin lips back in a sneer, she revealed long, yellow teeth and bloody gums. She coughed again and Theo twisted away, turning his head, but his hand didn’t leave his son’s shoulder. Instead he squeezed tighter until Jaimie’s shoulder hurt, urging him to walk faster.
 

“You’re taking too much!” she yelled again.

“You don’t get to say how much is too much, ma’am,” Theo said. “You don’t know how much I need.”

Her voice followed them around the end of the aisle. “Selfish!”
 

Jaimie knocked a box of steel wool pads from a shelf. When the boy stooped to pick up the boxes, Theo pulled him up and urged him on.

“I see you,” the old woman called. “I seen what you done!”

“Go home!” Theo yelled back. He wanted to sound commanding. Instead he felt weak, yelling at a sick old woman. He wasn’t sure she was wrong. Maybe he was taking too much.

In the next aisle, the old woman shuffled around the end, still watching. To Jaimie’s eyes, she looked less like a witch and more like a seething black mass, a swarm of black insects. Jaimie recognized the word he saw as he gazed at her. It was an ominous word that had sharp edges at the ends but was soft in the middle. He had often turned to the Ws to look at the word, to feel its danger. The word was “wraith”. That word tasted of bitter almonds. Before he closed the dictionary, he always made sure to look at a different word that made him feel safe and washed away the sour almonds: “Gesture” tasted of fresh sprouts; “pastoral” tasted the way grass looks; “cheery” was a brave, golden color that tasted of orange sorbet.
 

* * *
 

They waited in line a long time. Behind Jaimie, a scared Asian woman with bright, glassy eyes held a baby in her arms. She cooed to her child in a sing-song language Jaimie couldn’t understand, though he understood her colors. The sugary sweetness she used with the baby covered her lemony fear.

There was only one cashier here, too. He looked like a manager. He was an older man with wispy hair that looked like it needed combing. He looked tired and harassed.
 

In front of Theo, a burly man in a big camouflage coat stood very straight. Many people spoke in an excited staccato, voices full of chaos, but the big man grinned through his red bushy beard as he watched the crowd. He was a blob of red and blue in a sea of yellow fear. It occurred to Jaimie that the man was enjoying himself.
 

The man must have felt Jaimie’s stare because he looked down at the boy for a moment before giving Theo a smile. “Never think you’d ever see anything like it, eh?”

Theo shook his head. “Nope. Sure didn’t.”

“I did!” the man bragged. “Saw this coming a mile away.”

Theo gave him an encouraging nod, glad of the distraction.

“Remember that huge power outage a few years ago? The gas pumps didn’t work. I lost everything in my freezer, including twenty pounds of moose meat I’d shot the previous fall. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I drive for a living. I couldn’t work and I hate warm beer.”

“I remember,” Theo said. “Our power was out for three days and it was really hot. We slept in the basement and by the third night we were laying on top of the sheets as the heat settled on us. It felt like a wool blanket on a hot August night. We opened all the windows, but there wasn’t a breath of wind.”

“Yup, no air conditioning. The power was out for eight days up where I live. I had a lot of time to sit in the dark in my underwear and think. I decided I’d be ready to take care of things myself if anything happened again, hurricane, tornado, pestilence, whatever.” His colors came far out from his body and Jaimie stepped back a little, feeling overwhelmed.

“You know why we gotta take care of ourselves, mister? ’Cuz nobody’s coming. Like Obama said way back, we’re the crazy fools we been waiting for!” His laugh shook his belly and Theo smiled with half his mouth.
 

Jaimie hadn’t seen his father talk with other men much at all. Theo watched the stranger, his chin close to his chest but his body faced to the side, away from the big man in camouflage.

“Things are getting kind of crazy around here. Looks like you were right to get ready. What did you do to prepare?” His father sounded casual, but his colors took on a thin feel that told Jaimie his father’s interest was serious.

“Got two kinds of generators. That’s where I started. It kind of grew from there. I was raised in the woods, so I already knew a bunch of what I had to know, but the deeper I got into self-sustainability…well, the deeper I went.”

The line advanced a few steps. “I knew people when I was a kid who had an old house with a bomb shelter built in. That sounds fancy, but to lock yourself away in there would be kind of like hiding away in a small root cellar or something.”

“Yeah, all that duck and cover bull — ” The big man glanced at Jaimie and leaned closer to Theo, his voice low. “Survivalism gets a bad rap. The movement has been full of a lot of wackos and their macho racist bull. It was a good idea that was hijacked by a bunch of guys with a military fetish who get a little too excited about pictures in gun magazines, if you know what I mean. You listen to me on this ’cuz I’ve given it a lot of thought, I kid you not. They’d have been better off learning how to can their own beans and jar their own jellies instead of stocking up on more and more guns. Can’t eat a machine gun and there’s not much left of the bird if that’s how you shoot it. The green movement has gotten more into the nature appreciation part. That’s what sustainability is about. We’re in for a long storm, friend. You can bet on that.” The man stood straight again and looked around, as if, too late, to make sure no one had heard him.
 

“You really think it’s going to be that bad?”

“Look around you.” The stranger gestured to the crowd. “We’re always nine meals away from anarchy. Grocery stores don’t have more than three days of supplies on their shelves thanks to just-in-time delivery. I’ve been a trucker since I was twenty. I know all about just-in-time. Nobody keeps anything stored away anymore. Nobody’s putting stuff away for the winter. Not like a couple generations back. People are softer now and used to so many conveniences. I don’t think they’ll handle it so well as our grandparents or even our parents could have.”

Theo nodded again, encouraging him, and the man’s colors enveloped them again. He smiled broadly, glad of an audience. Loneliness, Jaimie thought, tastes dusty and makes the colors close to the heart turn to gray dust bunnies.

“If you eat it, wear it or use it, it comes by truck and it probably comes across a border. The borders are shut down. Each nation is an island now and when the government can’t help you, each man is an island. Each man is an island, at least when the chips are down and everything’s gone to uh…poop.” He gave Jaimie a kind glance and smiled again, revealing teeth too perfect to be real. “John Dunn had it wrong, huh?”

Theo failed to conceal his surprise and the man caught his look. “Poetry isn’t just for city folks, Professor. In fact, a case of beer and reading poetry in the woods go together quite nicely.”

The line advanced another few feet and the man in camouflage seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment. “I didn’t read much before I got into sustainability. I don’t know why. I mean…I read a lot of seed catalogues and fishing magazines before. I was on a sustainability forum and somebody kept talking about Walden, you know?”

“
On Walden Pond
.”

“Yeah. You know it. Good. Go read it if you haven’t, or read it again. I tell you now, Communism went under. Capitalism went under when we caught on that the brokers and bankers and the politicians were just out for themselves. Thoreau wrote the only manifesto we should pay attention to now.”

Behind them the baby began to cough. Both men hunched slightly. “Speaking of Dunn…” the man said.

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls — ” Theo said.

“Yeah. Don’t,” the man replied. “Nobody likes that answer.”

“I’ve gotta get out of this cesspool and up in isolation. My nearest neighbor up north is like five miles away.”

“Where’s that?” Theo asked.

“North. Just north.”
 

They smiled at each other, but Jaimie saw some yellow creep into the big man’s aura and the egg of energy took on hard edges.

The baby coughed again. Theo shifted his weight from foot to foot, anxious to leave. “You think we should wear masks?”

The man in camouflage laughed. “Looks like downtown China in here, doesn’t it? Nah. Those masks don’t do you any good. Viruses are small buggers and the masks these folks are wearing might make ’em feel good, but they’re really only good for keeping sawdust out when you’re using a circular saw.”