This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (6 page)

Only Jaimie caught his father’s barely breathed words, “Everybody always thinks they’re the ones who will make it.”

Jaimie squeezed his father’s hand and, without thinking about it or even knowing he could do such a thing, gave Theo some of his violet energy. He’d watched his father use jumper cables to help start a neighbor’s car once. The energy transfer was like that. Theo straightened, as if sensing a mild electric current. He broke away and looked at his son, more baffled than shocked. After a moment, he set his jaw as if dismissing a useless thought and went about handing each family member a garbage bag. He gestured toward the stacks. “Anything you want. Load up. It’s a free-for-all tonight. I’ve cracked open the vault. Go wild.”
 

Anna and Jack headed toward fiction. Jaimie followed his father, watching as he scoured the books. He glimpsed his mother and sister through gaps in the shelves. He could tell by the way they moved that they were browsing aimlessly, letting books of interest reveal themselves.

Theo moved with purpose, searching for particular titles. The yellow that had suffused him all day (
“Miasma” was the better word
, Jaimie thought) lifted, leaving Theo his usual vibrant blue-green. The library was his father’s home. This was where he knew all there was to know. Libraries were on the way out and his was a dying profession that would soon degenerate from quaint to irrelevant. Theo found a few books on camping and a dusty book with a battered jacket on canning and making jam and jellies. A book on hiking captured his attention but he grew more frustrated the longer he looked, as if the one perfect book he needed eluded him.

Anna filled her garbage bag and she carried a few more titles stacked on one arm. She placed those on the front counter before going off to look for more. They were mostly vampire romances and celebrity biographies. Jack appeared carrying a bible in each hand. One was a King James. The other was a bible translated into contemporary English.

After following his father around the library for a few minutes, Theo stopped, looked at Jaimie curiously, and offered his hand. Jaimie grasped it and pulled him with a surprisingly strong grip toward the reference section. The boy began pulling volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary from the shelf but Theo waved him off. “That’s too much, buddy,” he said. “It’s too heavy and takes up too much space.”

Jaimie nodded and pulled out a single large dictionary, followed by a slang dictionary. He thought better of that choice and pushed it back, favoring a dictionary of Latin terms instead.

“Interesting choice,” Theo said, but he did not deter his son further.
 

The family froze as a clatter of keys hit the front desk. “Hello?” The deep voice ricocheted off the concrete walls. “Anna? What are you doing here?”

The newcomer was Thad Krenner, Theo’s boss. His British accent was thick, “plummy” Theo called it. Mr. Krenner always wore a brown pilled sweater with a frayed collar underneath his rumpled sports jacket of the same shade as the sweater. Jaimie never saw him without that jacket. The boy made a mental note to look up “sports jacket” in the dictionary. He couldn’t think what sport Mr. Krenner played or how his tight jacket could be comfortable for playing any kind of physically demanding game. Mr. Krenner was enormous, and, though he always smiled Jaimie’s way under his sharply-trimmed moustache, his size and the force of his booming voice frightened the boy. “Loudest librarian on the planet,” Theo said.

“We’re all here, Thaddeus!” Jack called.

“The Spencers are all working overtime? I’m not sure we have it in the budget to hire all of you,” Krenner said.

Theo came to the front desk, a half-dozen books tucked under one arm. The family followed. Mr. Krenner looked down, eyeing Jaimie’s armful of dictionaries and a picture book that showed satellite pictures of Earth. His gaze lingered longer at the garbage bag at his feet, overflowing with Anna’s book choices.

“You’re not preparing for a siege are you?”

“Yes,” Theo said. “Yes, we are. Have you been watching the news?”

“Oh, a little bit, but there’s no need to overdose on it. It seems like the media is about their business, whipping everyone up. Too much, I say.”

Mr. Krenner looked to the bags of books, not looking directly at the Spencers. “You seem to be taking this stuff quite seriously, Theodore. No sense in that. This will all blow over. It’s true we closed the library early today, but that wasn’t my decision. The higher ups said the schools are closed so they insisted we all take some vacation time. It’s unfortunate, I think. I like to take my vacations at the cottage when the leaves turn.”

“I’ve been doing a lot of research and talking to some people who think we
should
take this seriously, Thad. We might be in isolation for a while.” Theo stepped closer and put on a smile Jaimie had never seen him use at home. “You can’t expect me to be locked up with the kids for more than a day or two without lots to entertain them, can you? You’re an animal lover. You wouldn’t do that to a dog, would you?”

Krenner laughed and Jaimie shrank behind his mother. The sound from the head librarian’s throat was a clatter of various sizes of dishes. When Jaimie peered from behind Jack, he said, “That young man of yours is getting tall. He wouldn’t cause you any trouble though. He’s not at all a chatterbox!” and laughed again.

Theo glanced to his son and reddened. “Has everyone got what they need?” Anna and Jack shrugged and nodded.

“We’ll take this out to the van. You two talk,” Jack said.
 

Jaimie stayed with his father, slipping his hand into Theo’s grip. He stared at Mr. Krenner’s wide and long shoes, studying their shine.
 

“Theodore, really, you mustn’t get yourself and your family too worked up about all this.”

“We’re just taking precautions.”

“It’s the tyranny for young people these days that they’re cursed with the expectation that they’ll all live forever if they can just do everything right, exercise themselves to exhaustion and eat the inedible just to squeeze a few more hours out of life. Stress gets us all in the end, and emptying out the shelves as soon as we close strikes me as something designed to cause me stress, running off with all the inventory in the night. You are not following procedures. Especially with the reference books. The dictionaries can’t go home with you.”

Theo squeezed his son’s hand and pulled him toward the door. “You’ll get over it, Thad. I hope you live long enough to get over it.”
 

Jaimie watched the big man’s certainty drain away. His aura shrank and yellows crept in at the edges, muddying his red and navy blue energies. After a pause, Mr. Krenner gave a short nod. “You think it’s as bad as all that, Theodore?”

“Call me Theo. You know that’s what I’ve always preferred yet you have always ignored my preference. It’s
Theo
.”

Krenner’s face went pale. His eyes shifted to Jaimie and he straightened, clearing his throat, looking for words. In a cheery tone that rattled empty, he said, “We’re in the lending business, after all…Theo.” He stuck out his hand and Theo shook it. “I hope you’ll soon find that all of this was no big deal.”

“I took a risk management course during my undergrad and I’ve thought about this a lot. My brother’s a doctor and…he told us things,” Theo said. “The cost-benefit analysis makes sense. Go to your cottage, Thad. Don’t wait for the leaves to turn. Go now. If I’m wrong, you can call me Theodore when you see me next and I’ll smile instead of gritting my teeth.”

Krenner turned away. His wave was more dismissive than friendly. Before he turned to the exit, Jaimie spotted the fleeting thin slash of black across Mr. Krenner’s back. A short, sharp bark erupted from Jaimie’s throat and Theo and his boss turned together to look at the boy, their mouths dropped open, as if both stood before a grotesque fun house mirror. Krenner sought out Jaimie’s eyes. The boy backed out, putting distance between himself and the man. Jaimie was sure Mr. Krenner would not live to see the leaves change at his cottage. He might not have another day before he felt the first symptoms of the Sutr Virus.

If Jaimie had taken a moment more — if he had been brave enough — he might have seen where that deadly slash of black went, and if it reached out for his father, planting its seeds for the horrific harvest to come.

As he retreated to the van, Jaimie held the Latin dictionary to his chest. The boy had opened it at random and caught one phrase which piqued his interest:
O tempora! O mores!
It meant,
These are bad times.
The dictionary entry looked like a prophecy. From the auras he had read, Jaimie was certain the world was about to get much worse.

Jaimie stepped into the car and leaned over to whisper in his sister’s ear. “Spiral.”
 

But Chaos rules The Last Cafe.

A
s Dr. Craig Sinjin-Smythe moved down the row of plastic cages in his Hazmat suit, his alarm grew. Six of ten of the first batch of rats were dead from the Sutr-X virus. Each white rat’s cage was labelled with a code number. Sinjin-Smythe had named them all: Ernest Borgnine, Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Sophia Loren, Ella Fitzgerald, Raymond Burr and Humphrey Bogart. The rats came and went, but he named them each the same.

“Something’s weird with the actors,” the doctor observed. His fiancee and colleague, Ava Keres, was listening through the open mic in his helmet. He had to speak up to be heard over the fan above his head.
 

Dr. Keres’ voice came through a little too loud. “As I’ve told you many times, your practice of naming them is silly, unscientific and against protocol.”

“Whimsical and creative,” Sinjin-Smythe replied.
 

“You use the same names repeatedly with all the specimens.”

“Somewhat creative, then.”
 

She sighed. “I don’t deserve you.”

They’d been together two years. It had been a tumultuous courtship. Ava could be imperious and lectured him on his idiosyncrasies. However, every time he had thought to break it off, she did something sweet for him. Since he had taken her with him when he moved to the Cambridge lab, she’d grown happier and softer around the edges. Or perhaps that was the baby. She was three months along. He’d wanted her to stay home as soon as the pregnancy test stick showed two pink dots. She told him she’d consider a leave of absence at six months. “The lab has so many precautions, the baby and I would be in just as much danger with me banging around the kitchen bored out of my skull. Besides, every day chaos is so scintillating.”

Sinjin-Smythe was especially glad of those precautions as he peered into the tenth cage. “Something’s wrong with Bogart. Do you have a clear picture?”

The helmet cam whirred and focussed as Ava adjusted the camera’s angle from the isolation lab’s observation booth. “I see a rat, Craig. Tell me.”

“Specimens one through six inclusively are deceased,” he said.

“Expected.”

“Uh-huh. Seven through ten are still alive, but Bogey isn’t looking too good.”

“Yes, yes.”
 

“Sophia, Ella and Raymond are docile.” He bent to peer closer. “Oh, god. The side of the cage…it’s like Bogey tried to break through the cage to get at Raymond. It’s smeared with saliva, feces and blood. Bogey’s lying on the bottom of his cage and Raymond’s cowering in a far corner.”

“Anything else unusual about ten?”
 

Sinjin-Smythe had difficulty maneuvering in the huge isolation suit as his air hose coiled and tightened behind him. His movements were slow and deliberate, as they had to be in the High Hazard Unit, but his pulse beat in his ears as his excitement grew. “Um…his eyes are looking milky. I haven’t seen that presentation bef — ” The rat launched at the doctor, smacking its head against the cage door.
 

Sinjin-Smythe stepped back from the rodent’s prison as fast as he could. Running away from the rat was irrational but involuntary. He planned to dissect Bogey’s body later that day, but he wished he held the scalpel in his hand now, or a flame thrower, perhaps.

* * *

The hyper-encrypted, military version of Skype was a bit slow to connect. However, when his screen filled with Dr. Daniel Merritt’s moon face from the CDC, Sinjin-Smythe forced his shoulders to relax. He didn’t say hello. “This could be an outlier, but we might have a new variant.”

Dr. Merritt was quick. As soon as Sinjin-Smythe described specimen ten’s behavior, he said it sounded like rabies.

“Have any of the other nodes reported anything like that?”

Merritt shook his head. “However, there are bats with rabies in Los Angeles and reports have come in that they are becoming more aggressive of late. There have been fatalities among the homeless, but we’re having a hard time determining numbers. It’s a low number so…” he shrugged. Health care and therefore epidemiological studies among the homeless were sketchy at best, especially in America. “We’re working on that to get some samples and find out what’s going on. Sutr’s a fast jumper, so it is a concern. Perhaps when the bats take up residence in a rich, white neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills, I’ll get more funding for techs on the ground.”

“My rat’s a fast jumper, too. I really thought it might smash right through the plastic for a moment there.” Sinjin-Smythe grinned, embarrassed at his admission. “I’ll have more for you after I autopsy the little bugger.”

Dr. Merritt gave him a long look. “It’s just the one rat, right?”

“Yes, I’m certain.”

“Good.” The CDC virologist shuffled some papers. “From the latest I’ve heard from the Middle East, one terrible strain of flu will be enough for us to deal with. The Dubai lab has gone red. Not just Julian. The whole lab’s staff are dead.”

“Think we can get more funding and help? Maybe pool more information with the Chinese?”

Dr. Merritt shook his head. “Nanjing went red late last night. We lost all communication with Dr. Seong’s lab. Radio silence from the Chinese government. No one’s sorted out what’s happened yet. I assume someone on their end is working on that. Or running for their lives to hide out in a Tibet monastery.”