This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (30 page)

But the highest-ranking politicians had family members they couldn’t take into a secure bunker. When the enemy is a virus, was there any such thing as “secure”? She supposed there could be, in some rarified circumstances, an army outpost under a mountain or a remote Center for Disease Control facility where everyone was jailed in plastic suits breathing artificial air all the time. The price of admission to that illusion of safety sounded too high.
 

What good was it to be a president or a senator or a prime minister if there was no one left to follow your orders? Were there still people taking orders, people so committed to duty that they’d carry on as if their families weren’t in danger? She supposed there must be. She hoped they existed. Whoever they might be, they would be as alien to her as any little-known exotic plant from Madagascar. She asked God to bless the research scientists and doctors and to provide an answer soon.

On Jack’s bedroom wall above the dresser hung a painting she’d created while she was pregnant with Jaimie. She preferred to paint in oils, but she was concerned about the toxins in oil paints and the elaborate cleanup the paint required. She’d switched to acrylic because she could simply clean her brushes with soap and water. It seemed a silly thing to have been overly cautious about now.

The small painting was a seascape. Smooth black rocks poked out of green water at low tide in Poeticule Bay. As an afterthought, she had stuck in a whale’s blue barnacled tail sticking out of the waves close to the shore. She’d grown up not far from that beach but had never once seen a whale there. However, the painting had asked for a whale tail. The process of creation, wherever that came from,
required
it. It was the whale’s tail that made her fall in love with that painting. It was her only painting that she had bothered to frame.
 

She had rushed out of the house with survival and Bently the Vulture on her mind. In the midst of panic, there was no room for art. “Scared widdle bunny wabbit,” she said to herself.

She took the picture from the wall. A rectangle of dust and unfaded paint told her exactly where it had hung. How could she have left without this? She had been afraid of Bently — she still was very much afraid of what he might do — but, except for Jaimie, they had all rabbited about in a panic.
 

Bently’s threat, the first of her life since schoolyard tiffs to be sure, had sent her running. How would her family deal with the challenges ahead if they couldn’t face down one scrawny man? The house was not on fire when they’d run across the street to Douglas Oliver’s house. She hadn’t thought to take her painting, or even a couple photo albums. Even people fleeing houses on fire thought to grab their kids’ baby pictures.

How deep would Sutr reach down into the fabric of what had been and tear with unforgiving teeth? How resilient was that fabric? Was civilization just a thin sheen of varnish over shiny, black claws of primal aggression? She knew Theo thought so, but she hoped her husband was wrong.

Perhaps that hope led her to the back of the closet in Jaimie’s bedroom. She knew it was the one place where her memory box would be safe from Anna’s prying eyes. The letters were still there in a large round cookie tin marked “Personal.” It was taped shut and it took Jack a few minutes of working with her thumbnail to pry up the yellowed, gummy tape. She hadn’t looked at any of these letters since before the kids were born…no, before she and Theo had even moved in together.
 

All the letters were from Theo to Jack. He’d always called her Jack, from the moment she’d introduced herself as Jacqueline. She had tied the envelopes in small bundles with lengths of red ribbon. It made her feel like she had been a silly girl. There was something Victorian and stupid about squirrelling this bit of their history away.
 

“In case of emergency, dig out tin and remind yourself you were young once,” she announced to the empty room.
 

Jaimie’s room was remarkably empty except for books stacked in neat piles on his desk. The room wasn’t big enough for an echo, but there was a definite ring of emptiness off the bare walls. Unlike every other teenage boy she’d ever met, there wasn’t a single poster. On her knees by Jaimie’s bed, she spread the love letters out before her in little piles arranged by date. The collection now seemed far more sad than she had anticipated when she’d dug them out from the rear of the closet’s top shelf.
 

Theo had written her long letters every day detailing how unhappy he was without her. He’d been planting trees in Oregon while she waitressed at Poeticule Bay’s Seafarer’s Pub.
 

All the letters were about missing her, professing love. Her then-boyfriend wrote about the physical pleasures they’d shared at Stanford. She supposed Anna felt those needs now when she thought of that dolt, Trent Howser.
 

Theo and Jack were apart all that summer and the next. He got a summer job as a house painter in Illinois from a college buddy and she stayed with an aunt in Bangor and temped in secretarial jobs.
 

The separation had been hard on them both, each worrying about the other’s summer temptations, wondering if their young romance could bear the weight of time between the beginning of April and the end of August. Each September when they reunited at Standford, they found their love had survived the time apart.

She paged through a few letters at random: One from June (depressed at their separation); another from July (an angry rant that his father had gotten him the painting job and how low the pay was.) The letters leading up to the end of August became more giddy. (Only 15 days left! was written on one envelope.) Theo wrote the number of days until their reunion on the same spot in small script under each stamp.
 

Some of the letters were, of course, pornographic, all in Theo’s rushed, slashing handwriting. She had given as good as she got, but when she asked him once where her letters to him went, he shrugged and said he’d thrown them away so no one else could read them. She’d been silent for two days after he told her that and he hadn’t understood how his lack of sentimentality could make her so angry.
 

Everyone older than e-mail, she supposed, must have letters they don’t want their children to read. No worries with Jaimie, there. She knew handwriting was as opaque to him as the printed word was hypnotic.
 

But what teenage girl, no matter how virtuous, wouldn’t read the letters from her father as a young man to her mother? Jack was afraid that, at best, Anna would invade her privacy and rationalize it by getting all gooey over how romantic her parents had been. Then, at an inopportune time — during an argument over Trent, for example— Anna would throw the letters in her face, reminding her mother that she was trying to deny her daughter the exquisite sex life she had enjoyed until Theo fell ill.

Jack reached for another letter at random. On the back, Theo had written S.W.A.K. “Sealed with a Kiss.” She kissed the back of the envelope now and began to cry. She couldn’t kiss her husband now, not without fear of inviting infection. Now that this simple pleasure was denied her, it seemed more important than ever that she be allowed the indulgence.

She threw the letters back in the tin, still sobbing with great heaving gasps. It wasn’t because she couldn’t kiss Theo that she cried now. It was because going through these old sweet and sexy letters now seemed like a morbid act, nostalgia transformed into something ugly. She felt like an old widow pouring over a dead husband’s correspondence.
 

It was then that she felt she wasn’t alone. There was a creak at the top of the stairs that she knew well. Whenever either of the kids got up at night to go to the bathroom, that floorboard creaked.
 

A month ago, Jack had stopped Theo in the middle of urgent but quiet lovemaking because she had detected a noise, so attuned were they to the squeaks and creaks of hallway floorboards. Anna, in a rare post-midnight bathroom trip, had gotten up to pee. Theo and Jack giggled and whispered, unwilling to continue until they could be reasonably sure Anna had returned to her room, oblivious to incriminating sounds from her parents’ room.
 

Another creak.

Had she locked the back door? She wasn’t sure. No, probably not, she decided. She was only going to be a moment but when she glanced at her watch she wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since she’d entered the house. It must be at least twenty-five minutes.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” She already knew the answer. For a moment she thought about hiding under the bed, but if the intruder hadn’t heard her crying already, he certainly knew she was in there now.
 

She cast about, but could see nothing that could be used as a weapon.
 

Creak!

“I’ve got a gun here!” she said. She’d have been delighted to at least have a long sharp stick. The heat rose in her cheeks. She was still on her knees by the bed, frozen. Her legs and buttocks ached from tensing.
 

Wouldn’t that old over-under from her childhood home be great to have now? That would change the entire equation.
I used to be such a liberal,
she thought. A crazed laugh burst from her lips.
 

Jaimie stood at the door holding his Latin dictionary. He peered into his room. He didn’t look right at her, but instead appeared to be looking to her left, as if a ghost stood behind her only the boy could see.
 

“Jaimie! You scared the hell out of me! If I’d had a shotgun I would have blown your head off.”

He seemed unperturbed, but he usually looked that way. His cold detachment unnerved her.

“Nothing personal.” Her hands were ice as she put them to her hot cheeks. “I’m shocky.” She went to her son and held him. As usual, he let her, infuriating her anew with his indifference.
 

“Sorry,” she said absently and squeezed him tighter to her chest.

He put a hand on her elbow and began guiding her out of his room and down the stairs, pulling her.
 

“Wait,” she said, and went back for her whale painting. He followed her and pulled again on her arm, at first timidly and then he got behind her and pushed. She ran ahead, downstairs to the book case in the living room to grab her wedding album and another book of baby pictures.
 

She tucked the painting awkwardly under her arm, cut through the dining room into the kitchen with her son on her heels. She scooped up the big bag full of smaller plastic bags. She took a moment to stuff the albums in one of the bags.
 

Jaimie pushed her again, urging her to go, but she slipped around him and back upstairs. An afterthought, she ran to Jaimie’s bedroom and hurriedly piled the letters back into the tin. The circle of the cookie can stretched the mouth of the biggest bag, but she managed to stuff it in and headed downstairs.
 

Jaimie kept pushing even as she was passing through the back door.
 

“Okay! Okay!”

Her shoes clapped on the concrete of the deck in an angry rush. Now Jaimie pulled her back and held her fast. Jack rounded on her son. “What? What? This strong silent type thing is really getting on my nerves.”

He waved at her in an impatient “c’mere” gesture and headed toward the fence at the rear of their property.
 

Mrs. Bendham’s house was to their right. Jaimie cut left, looking back just long enough to confirm his mother followed. With surprising grace, Jaimie put one hand on the top of the fence and climbed over, never dropping his dictionary.

Jack handed him the bags and leaned over to carefully put her painting in the tall grass on the far side. With less grace, she climbed over. They stood at the rear of their other neighbor’s property.
 

The bungalow belonged to Mr. Sotherby, an aging, divorced pilot who seemed to use his house as a quick pitstop to change clothes and head off again. A lawn care company took care of the property, at least until recently. Jack had never glimpsed the pilot out of uniform. Whenever they had seen him, he was rushing somewhere.
 

It occurred to Jack in that moment how he was so much like Douglas Oliver, as if they were the only family in The Neighborhood of Mysterious Old Bachelors.
 

There was something different about Jaimie now. His was not the usual dreamy, distracted stare. He was looking for something. His head was often cocked to one side (his bewildered cockatoo look, she called it.) Now he moved with purpose, his back straight. He gripped her forearm tightly, the same way she held him in pressing crowds. Now it was her son’s turn to lead her.

Then Jack heard something: A bicycle’s gear shift. Someone was out front of the house in the street. She peeked around the front corner of her empty house.

Bently steered in a circle, staring at the Spencer house. She pulled back quickly and prayed he missed her. In a blink, she’d had taken in all the information she needed. The rifle stood high in the bicycle’s handlebar basket. She had also spotted a red gas can stuffed in beside the rifle.
 

In trying to push a thought away, an idea is given more power and it comes for you, stronger and scarier. The image that popped up was of her children, on fire and screaming.

“Get out of here!” she heard. It was Oliver, yelling from his front lawn. “Go! Get away!”

She risked another look and saw that Bently now stood beside Oliver in the Bendham’s driveway. Bently dismounted, looking relaxed. Oliver whispered something, his gestures urgent. Bently nodded, got on his bike and pedaled away slowly, defiantly.
 

When Bently was out of sight, she leaned out to make sure the vulture was gone. She thought the old man had retreated back into Mrs. Bendham’s house but she was wrong. Douglas Oliver stared at her. Was he startled because he thought she’d done something wrong? Or had she seen something she was not supposed to see?