The Living Dead Series (Book 2): World Without End (4 page)

“Sure, that works for us,” said the woman holding the baby. “I’m Sophia and this is my husband, John.” She shifted the sleeping baby on her shoulder. “And this is Hannah.”

As if she knew she were being discussed the baby opened sleepy brown eyes, yawned and then went back to sleep. The wind picked up and Sophia turned to keep the twirling snowflakes from hitting the tiny, brown, pink-cheeked face.

“Jackson Brown, nice to meet all of you. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking and no, I’m not the rock-star diva. Just call me Jack” said the man in the checked hat. “Staying together is a good idea and I think we’d better get going now.”

Bea tucked her scarf into the neck of her coat; it was cold and getting colder. They climbed the steps up and out into the frozen streets.

Away from the Metro, Foggy Bottom bustled with activity. The corner bodegas were packed and one store had already put up a sign proclaiming they were out of milk. Cars, some abandoned, blocked the streets. Bea looked but didn’t see a Circulator bus anywhere.

She remembered the pizza Brian wanted but the queues to get in the stores snaked outside onto the sidewalks. She doubted anything would be left even if she did eventually get inside. Screams pierced the night down the street but nothing was visible through the crowded mass of people.

Their little group kept going, past the George Washington University Hotel and onto the backstreets. The snow-encrusted tree branches sparkled white in the street lamps and the brick sidewalks were slippery with re-frozen slush. Television screens shone through windows of the charming little row houses back here and Bea thought that she should have told Brian to either close the blinds or turn the TV off. Or would signs of habitation scare the ill people away? She thought again of the man shaking the gates and increased her pace. They came to K Street.

Sophia and John split off here and headed for Twenty-second and Jack turned the corner to his place near the church. Bea and David were alone. He walked along, testing the bars in the occasional wrought iron fence to see if he could break a loose one off for use as a weapon. Just as they came to the end of the block, he found one and bent it back and forth until it snapped off. He looked incongruous in his suit and tie and expensive Brooks Brothers coat, destroying someone’s fence.

“I think that’s stealing if not vandalism, David.”

“I’ll take my chances. It’s dangerous out here and much worse than the Feds are reporting. It’s quiet now but we’re not safe.”

“How do you know it’s much worse?”

“I work with Homeland Security and we- well, let’s just say that we are confident this is going to be big, maybe bigger than we can imagine.”

“So this is a terrorist attack?”

“No. If it were I would still be at the office. This is beyond anything we’ve ever run into before. It’s not- well, it’s just too big. You need to arm yourself.”

“I’ll be home in twenty minutes. I’ll be fine.”

“Suit yourself but-” he paused and kicked and bent and twisted another piece of railing until it broke off then handed it to her. “It practically fell into my hand,” he said with wide, innocent eyes. He had nice eyes and a charming, somewhat reluctant smile. “Take it, you might need it.”

“Since you’re offering, I’ll take it.” She hefted it in her left hand and touched the very sharp, fleur-de-lis tip. An unpleasant flashback of her hair skewer going into Ben’s eye arose in her mind and she lowered the bar to her side. “But I won’t need it.”

“We all prefer a war in which we don’t have to fire a shot but that seldom happens.”

“What are you talking about? This isn’t a war. It’s a health scare like H1N1 or Swine Flu. People are over-reacting. It’s going to blow over in a week, maybe two.” Bea tried to read his face but it was too dark.

“Let’s hope so. Anyway, this is where I leave you. My place is two blocks up this way. Good luck, Beatrice Actually, and be careful.”

He walked off, swinging his piece of wrought iron like a cane. She turned left. Farther down the street, light spilled onto the sidewalk from the little corner grocery where she had shopped for years. She sort of knew the Vietnamese family that owned it even though their knowledge of English was mostly confined to numbers and money while her knowledge of Vietnamese was non-existent.

She saw Mrs. Ngo behind the counter and she smiled but the woman did not see her. The door appeared to be locked so she knocked on the glass. Mrs. Ngo dropped the zippered money pouch she held. Coins rolled across the black-and-white checked tile floor and she scrambled to pick them up, all while making go-away motions in Bea’s general direction. Puzzled she moved closer to the glass at which Mrs. Ngo screamed and ran into the back of the store.

There was something smeared on the glass. She gave it a light scrape with her fingernail and it came off black and flaky. Great streaks of it obscured the lower part of the glass wall and continued on down to the sidewalk where it turned into dark splashes then ended in a thick, congealed pool a few feet down the street. After that, dark footprints led out into the street then faded away. A part of her mind identified the substance while another part shied away from acknowledging that identification.

Walking as quietly and quickly as possible now, she continued on her way. Psychosis. That’s what the woman on the train had called it. Mrs. Ngo hadn’t looked psychotic, just spooked. But those people on the train and near the museum were definitely around the bend.

The mixture of apartment buildings and stores soon gave way to last century row houses that in turn yielded to large houses just glimpsed through towering trees. The wind had picked up and moaned and whistled through the streets, rustling the dry, leathery leaves still clinging to the pin oaks. Twice she thought she heard dragging footsteps behind her but she saw no one. She crossed the street and soon walked beside a chiseled, granite wall.

After their mother left, Bea and Brian continued to live in the subsidized housing complex until her sophomore year at Towson when she was awarded a scholarship and transferred to Georgetown. Between her jobs, the scholarship and student loans she had just enough money to rent the pool house of a rundown Georgetown estate close to the C&O Canal. It only had one bedroom and the canal smelled in summer but they were allowed to use the pool in season and the rent was not unreasonable since she agreed to mow the grass as needed. She enrolled Brian at the Foggy Bottom magnet school.

Trying not to crunch on the snow and ice she approached carefully, remembering the man Brian said was at the gate. No one was there now but the snow was heavily trampled. She walked around the corner, lifted the heavy fall of English ivy, and slipped in through the narrow break in the wall.

Light shone from the windows in the back of the small columned building, flickering, moving lights from the television. The main house was purely Georgian in design but the pool house had been built as a tiny, Greek temple, complete with myrtles lining cracked, marble steps that were treacherously icy-slick tonight. She clomped carefully to the top and, propping the iron fence rail against the wall, opened the unlocked back door that led directly into the kitchen.

“So this is what you call being locked up? Brian, anyone could have walked right in here!” She was annoyed and forgot how worried she had been. Unwinding the foul-smelling scarf from around her neck she hung it on the doorknob to let it air out then washed her hands.

“Oh, I forgot about that door. Thanks, Bea. I’ll lock it next time,” he called unconcernedly from the front room that served as both their living room and Bea’s bedroom. “Did you get the pizza?”

He had unfolded her futon and sat cross-legged watching as a newscaster pinpointed areas on a map that were under threat from an expected tsunami. New Orleans seemed to be their main focus but all of the Florida panhandle and other coastal areas were in danger.

The light from the television both highlighted and shadowed a face that was changing seemingly overnight. Her brother still had the thinness of childhood and was small for his age. His neck grew weedily through the collar of his slightly too large tee shirt but his arms and legs were growing longer, coltish. He looked over at her and smiled. She noticed that he needed a haircut.

“No pizza. Everything was too crowded. The cupboards are full though. Couldn’t you find anything here?”

He held up an empty chip bag and carton of milk. “Pizza just sounded good, you know? I ate the rest of the turkey and made macaroni and cheese. There’s still some on the stove if you want it.”

“Maybe later. What are they saying about the flu?”

“They stopped talking about it. Now they’re just talking about evacuating everyone from New Orleans. They’re pretty sure the levees will fail again. Did they call you?”

“Did who call me? New Orleans?”

“No. The school.” He changed subjects with dizzying rapidity lately. “They said they were going to call you for a conference.”

Her heart sank. “Brian, what did you do?”

He was going through a phase right now of testing everyone and everything in his life. The guidance counselor suggested it might be due to the lack of a strong male role model at home or it might be that he was a very intelligent boy exploring his boundaries. She couldn’t do anything about either of those situations.

“It wasn’t really bad, Bea. I left after fifth period yesterday. With Deshawn. It wasn’t like we were doing anything in that class anyway, just reviewing for the test. I knew all of it already. I bet you I made a hundred on it.”

He probably had but that wasn’t the issue. “Where did you go? You and Deshawn.”  Deshawn was his best friend and usual co-conspirator.

His eyes lit up. “That’s the part I wanted to tell you! We went over to St. Alban’s on Massachusetts and watched everyone leave. There were about a hundred black limousines lined up at the school, waiting to pick up all those rich kids. They had their suitcases and stuff and just took off. Deshawn and I think it’s because of the flu. It must be really bad, Bea.”

St. Albans was a private school heavily patronized by the Washington elite. Politicians and high-ranking government officials sent their kids there, some as day students, others boarded on campus. It wasn’t a holiday or term break right now. She wondered why so many children had been pulled from school. If the boys were right then it meant the government elite had known something yesterday that they hadn’t shared with the rest of the city or country, for that matter.

“It must be,” she conceded. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you skipped school and no, by the way, no one has called me about it. I guess I need to call Deshawn’s mom. She might not want you guys to hang out anymore if you’re going to do stuff like this.”

That got his attention and he looked a little ashamed of himself. She really had no idea how to deal with this. Until recently they had always been a team, aware that their survival in the world depended on the two of them alone. They had absolutely no one to fall back on. But he was pulling away from her now. While that might be normal, it didn’t make it any easier. Maybe who she really needed to talk to was Deshawn’s dad. She had noticed that Deshawn was carefully respectful of his father who seemed like a no-nonsense kind of guy. Maybe he would be willing to spend some time with Brian. But how could she ask something like that?

She mentally shelved the problem and picked up the pot of macaroni and cheese. Nudging Brian over, she joined him on the futon, eating the cold noodles and watching TV, catching up on all the news she had ignored in the last few days. She watched the edited versions of the attacks in Haiti and heard about the quarantine there. Brian offered to show her the raw versions available on the internet but the television version was bad enough.

On C-Span they watched the repeat of the announcement about the hospital strategic bombing and wondered why the President or even his press spokesperson hadn’t broken the news. Maybe it was like the man boarding the Metro said and they really had all left town before the announcement was made.

Delayed reaction set in and she started to shake, remembering the meaty feel of stabbing Ben in the eye, the blood on the train windows, the woman’s body jerking and sizzling when she stepped on the live rail. She ran to the bathroom and the noodles came up as she retched. She rinsed her mouth and brushed her teeth, then showered, scrubbing her hands over and over like Lady Macbeth, expecting to see blood. She told Brian she must have eaten something bad at lunch.

They watched television until late in the night, the wind and snow howling around the pool house, a small haven of warmth and light in the vast, icy metropolis.

“H
e’s back,” Brian called out from his bedroom.

“Who’s back?” Bea looked up from making breakfast in the miniscule, sunny kitchen.

“No, wait, I think it’s a different guy. Okay. Yeah, definitely another guy but he’s rattling the gates. This one isn’t wearing a shirt, Bea. He looks bad.”

Bea poured the last two golden pools of pancake batter onto the griddle and watched them puff up before flipping them then adding them to the stack on the platter. She turned off the stove eye and went to look out the window.

A man stood outside on the sidewalk but he was bumping into the gates more than he was shaking them. He wore only pajama pants or hospital scrub pants. It was hard to tell. He seemed dazed. The sun shone blindingly on the snow and she closed the blinds. 

They ate breakfast, Brian demolishing the pancake stack in minutes. She had already inventoried their food. Since she bought in bulk when she could to save money, they had enough to last two weeks or better if they rationed a little. Would this all be over in two weeks? After what she had seen on television last night she doubted it. They had lots of rice and pasta and canned goods but very little bottled water or milk. If the water was shut off they would be in bad shape within days.

Only two networks were still broadcasting what looked like a loop of yesterday’s news over and over. There was an interview with a Health Department official advising using caution when dealing with infected individuals. As far as Bea was concerned, people would be better advised to just run away, caution was not the proper word.

She couldn’t stop reliving the scene with Ben. 9-1-1 was out of service for the time being and she had stopped trying to get through. What could they do anyway? A sound of clashing metal broke into her reverie and she looked out at the man at the gates. He had to be freezing. Even though the sun was out it hadn’t really warmed up any and the snow was not melting at all.

Trying again to call Evan she could only leave another voicemail and she began to fear she would never get through. His apartment was in Dupont Circle and she didn’t know how hard hit that area had been.

Opening the door to the linen closet she called to Brian to come help her with the footlocker. Together they dragged it into the front room. She looked high and low for the key before remembering it was on her key ring.

The lock was rusty but the key turned smoothly and they found the guns, small but lethal looking, nestled amongst old school papers, stuffed animals, random computer cables and unlabeled CDs. Brian was surprised that they had them but, with the help of the internet, soon identified them.

“Ok, these two are both .38 calibers. Do you think they’re loaded?” he asked Bea, peering inside the barrel of the gun.

She blanched and told him to place them both on the floor,
carefully
. “Let’s just assume they’re all loaded until we’re sure they’re not.”

All of the guns were unloaded. They cleaned and dry-fired them, trying to get comfortable with the feel of them. They found a few bullets for the two revolvers but nothing for the Glock. Brian seemed to enjoy the whole process; maybe it was a guy thing. For her part, every time she touched the cold steel she was reminded just how fragile flesh and bone are, how easily pierced and broken.

The whole time they kept the television on. The reports grew more fantastic throughout the day with entire states being declared too dangerous to enter. Police set up barricades at the Tennessee and North Carolina borders, trying to keep Virginia in what they called a “clean zone.” Although how it could be considered “clean” with an outbreak in D.C., she didn’t know. The networks had completely lost contact with their affiliates in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

Locals were blogging on the internet and posting warnings to stay away from the Metro. The entire underground was supposed to be full of the roaming flu victims and they were attacking with no provocation. Opinions varied as to why they were eating their victims. Bea went back and read this again. Okay, she knew they were attacking but eating? Here?

The garden gates
clanged
again. Mr. No-Shirt now had a friend. A woman in a darkly- stained nightgown wandered confusedly off and on the sidewalk, falling over occasionally but always getting up and returning to the gates. Bea squinted to reduce the glare and saw that their eyes were completely white. A strong wind still blew, scattering and swirling the dry, powdery snow.

Bea shivered. The insulation in the pool house was not great since it had never been intended for year-round use.  The granite estate walls blocked out some of the winter winds and in summer they were shaded by enormous poplars so it could be worse but still- she was freezing. She donned a wool sweater and thick socks. Just as she pulled the sweater over her head, she heard her phone buzz. It was Evan.

“Evan, are you okay? Are you home?”

“Not exactly. Some of us got sort of trapped last night at the Spotted Owl. There were a bunch of flu cases outside and we decided to wait them out but they waited
us
out. The streets are full of even more of them this morning.”

“You know they’re attacking people, right? How are you going to get out?” Bea asked.

“We’re still working on that. The little guy got home from school alright?”

“He did.”

“Good. Don’t go anywhere unless you have to. I’m coming over as soon as I figure out how to get out of here. And Bea?” Static was crackling on the line.

“What?”

“Get a weapon and keep it with you all the time. I have to go-”

He was gone but at least she knew that he was alive. Leave it to Evan to get stuck in a bar during the apocalypse.

“Bea, look at this. Hurry!” Brian called from the front room.

The television showed an aerial view of the city from a helicopter. Entire blocks were on fire. Visible through the drifting smoke were crowds milling about with no clear purpose. They were definitely not dressed for the weather, some in pajamas and some wearing nothing at all.

“Looting and vandalism at unprecedented levels are going on throughout the eastern half of the country. Food stores and food distribution centers are virtually empty as are pharmacies.”

Viewers were sending in video of people emerging from the ocean, water-swollen, skin hanging in shreds, wandering from the beaches and into the towns, attacking anyone they found in the streets. Homeless shelters were full to bursting and ABC played audio of a family screaming, begging to be let inside. Their cries faded as they were overwhelmed by the sick in the streets.

“FEMA continues to urge everyone to stay home and out of the streets unless they have no other option. Emergency rooms and hospitals should be avoided as they are no longer considered safe due to large numbers of infected individuals in their vicinity.” The news anchor’s make-up looked patchy and her hair was scraped back from her face in an unflattering but practical pony tail. Her closing attempt at a smile was more like a grimace and she walked away from the news desk even before the cameras cut away. They continued to show the almost deserted studio and Bea supposed commercials were irrelevant for the time being. She went to the window.

A third person joined the pair outside the gates, this one fully-dressed but just as dazed or mindless as the original two. The high wall around the estate, while offering Bea and Brian additional protection also made it very difficult to see what the rest of the neighborhood looked like. Were the streets out there crammed with sick people roaming and attacking or were there just a few here and there? How long would it be until the police or National Guard or whoever restored order and life could get back to normal? She felt a small hand clasp hers and she held it tight while they contemplated the wintry landscape.

“Bea, how tall was Dad?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe six feet or so. Why?”

“Some of the girls at school are taller than me. Deshawn is too, now.”

“You’ll catch up. Girls grow faster at this age. Deshawn’s mom and dad are both pretty tall so he probably will be too.”

“Mom was five and a half feet tall.”

“You remember that?” Bea was surprised. This was the most they had talked about their parents in years.

“I always remember Mom. I think about her every day.”

She spent the afternoon combing the internet for information on the flu and found out that it was actually a virus, probably a retrovirus like AIDS which made it really, really hard to combat since it mutated rapidly. There was no evidence that it had been weaponized by anyone but some comments were highly skeptical of that. There were entire websites claiming it was either a government experiment gone wrong, a terrorist attack, or possibly alien in origin. What did seem obvious was that it acted quickly on its victims and it had originated in and spread from Haiti following the earthquake.

What she couldn’t find was any information on how long it lasted. No one seemed to know. She clicked through everything from Homeland Security Newswire to the Mayo Clinic and found nothing.

“It never goes away.” Bea jumped at the sound of Brian’s voice. She didn’t know how long he had been standing there, reading over her shoulder.

“Did they just say that on the news?”

“No. They’re all dead, the victims. They come back to life and eat people.”

“Come on, Brian. This isn’t one of Deshawn’s video games. Did he come up with that or did you?”

“Neither. Bea, it’s obvious. That lady outside is missing an arm. No one can walk around like that. She probably bled to death hours ago. Now she’s hungry for a new host. It’s how the virus works. Move over, I’ll show you. ”

Brian pulled up what looked like doomsday websites and they began to read personal blogs from terrified people around the country. Some had no food or water already and were desperately hoping for rescue. A few people had restrained family members as they reached the psychotic stage of the illness and were trying to figure out when they could release them. Like Brian said, there were conjectures that the victims died and were reanimated. These sites cited the impossibility of surviving the type of injuries the infected sustained.

Bea stopped reading. It was too overwhelming. The picture painted by the bloggers was so bleak. She looked out the window again. Brian was right. The woman in the nightie had a raw, dark stump where her arm should be. No one could survive that without medical attention. Or did the virus somehow act as a super-charged styptic, constricting the blood vessels and stopping the bleeding?

The television was on but muted and showing another map pointing out infection hot spots. D.C. and most of northern Virginia and southern Maryland were completely red and were no-go areas. According to the map she and Brian were as good as dead. She couldn’t accept that. There had to be an end to this, a good end. She had to find a way to get them somewhere safe.

The first thing she needed to do was get the lay of the land and she couldn’t do that from here. If she could get into the main house and upstairs she could see what the streets were like. If they were clear enough to drive through she would somehow steal a car and they would be on their way, picking up Evan along the way if they could. She would find someplace, somehow for them to stay until things got better. After all, no bad situation lasted forever.

The identity of their neighbors in the tall, red brick, Georgian main house was something of a mystery. According to the rental agency through which Bea leased the pool house, the same family had owned the property for several generations. Every year in late September, an ancient, green Mercedes rolled down the carefully raked driveway and a driver got out and helped a small, bent figure wearing a gray raincoat step carefully across the gravel and into the house. They were followed by a woman in a pale blue uniform who looked like a nurse or a caregiver. The driver then came back out and unloaded a small mountain of matching luggage, carrying it into the house through the porte-cochere. The same driver came and went on various errands but had never spoken to Bea. Groceries were delivered on a regular basis.

Last fall one of the towering poplars went down in a windstorm giving Bea and Brian an unimpeded view of a glassed-in porch that had been mostly obscured before. The house’s occupant often sat in the lovely room during the day and on weekends. No opportunity had ever arisen to meet him or her and their name remained a question mark.

Today, thought Bea, I finally meet the neighbors. Brian said he saw the driver return yesterday afternoon with a few bags of groceries but hadn’t seen him since.

“Do you want to come with me?” Bea asked while pulling on her oldest, most comfortable hiking boots. “I shouldn’t be gone that long and they might not even let me in.”

“No, I’ll stay here. You should take one of the revolvers though.”

She opened her mouth to say that was ridiculous then stopped. He was right.

“Good idea. Lock up behind me and if I don’t come back, though I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t, call Evan. Promise?” She reluctantly put a revolver in her pocket.

The air outside smelled like smoke and she saw what looked like gray feathers on the snow. She knew parts of the city were on fire but hadn’t expected smoke and ash to drift this far. The wind still blew and clouds, heavy with snow, were beginning to bank in the western sky. She crunched across the yard and went around the side of the house to the front door and rang the doorbell.