This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3

  This Plague of Days

  The Complete Three Seasons

  OMNIBUS EDITION

  Robert Chazz Chute

  Published by Ex Parte Press

  ISBN 978-1-927607-24-4

  Copyright 2013 Robert Chazz Chute

  First Edition: June 2013

  Cover design by Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com

  All rights reserved.

  Address media and rights inquiries and reader correspondence to: expartepress@gmail.com.

  Dedicated, as always, to J, C and C.

  Special thanks to Kit Foster, Alex Kimmell and Armand Rosamilia.

  To the editorial dream team: Dr. Janice Kurita, Mark Young, Mazie Lane, Brian Wright, John Badger, Johanna Goldenberg, Margie Colton and Peter Hawkins. Without their help, the TPOD saga would not be possible.

  1

  This Plague of Days

  Season One

  Season 1, Episode 1

  All words began as magic spells.

  *

  Things taken from us are what we treasure most.

  *

  You get what you deserve.

  *

  Journey with me down a long, twisted optic nerve,

  such wondrous sights to show.

  By strange harbors, roads dip and paths swerve.

  We have palaces to explore, places to go,

  and capricious gods to serve.

  Among hanging cliffs and dangerous curves,

  just when you think you’re winning,

  The End is The Beginning,

  our humanity too precious to preserve.

  ~ Notes from The Last Cafe

  Here We Sit in The Last Cafe

  “Viruses are zombies,” Dr. Sutr said. “They are classifiable neither as living nor dead. When given the opportunity, they reproduce using a host. Their molecules form complex structures but they need hosts to reproduce. Nucleic acids, proteins — ”

  The Skype connection froze for a moment before the doctor understood he was being interrupted. “—preciate your summary, Doctor.” Two men in uniform and one woman in a suit, each with their own screen, regarded him with impatience.

  “The virus has grown more…opportunistic. What fooled us early on was the varied rate of infection and lethality. I suspect individual variance in liver enzymes accounts — ”

  The woman cleared her throat and Sutr lost his place in the notes he’d prepared for this meeting. She sighed as he fumbled with his iPad. He had too many notes and not enough time. The woman sighed and tapped a stylus on her desk. “I’m meeting with him soon, Doctor. I need the bullet, please. What do I tell him?”

  Sutr removed his glasses and closed his eyes. This was too important to stammer and stutter through. Finding the correct words had never mattered more. He took a deep breath but kept his eyes closed and pretended he was speaking intimately with his beloved Manisha. His wife’s name meant “wisdom” and she shared her name with the goddess of the mind. He needed her and her namesake now. “My team and I…” He took another deep breath. “The virus has jumped.”

  The admiral in dress whites spoke, which automatically muted Dr. Sutr’s microphone. “First it was bats, then birds, then migratory birds, then pigs and cows. What animal do we warn the WHO about now? What animal do the Chinese have to slaughter next to keep the cap on this thing? A vaccine won’t help billions of Chinese peasants if they starve to death first.”

  “I’m very aware of the stakes, sir, but the virus has jumped to humans. I asked my contact at Google to watch the key words. The epidemiological mapping of the spread is already lighting up in Japan, Malaysia, Chechnya and I have confirmation it’s in parts of the Middle East, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s your next step, Doctor?” the woman asked.

  Sutr opened his eyes. “I’ve sent my team home. They should be with their families now. As should we all.”

  The man in the green uniform, a four-star general, leaned closer to his camera, filling Sutr’s screen. “This is no time to give up the fight, doctor. We’ve got a world to save from your…what did you call it? Zombie virus?”

  “Pardon me, General. It was a clumsy metaphor. My point was that viruses are dead things and I can’t kill the dead. I’m afraid we lost containment. I suspect we must have lost control sometime in the last two to three weeks. Perhaps less. Maybe more. There are too many variables. This virus is a tricky one. Something…new.”

  The general paled. “Are you saying this disease was engineered?”

  For the first time, Sutr showed irritation toward his inquisitors. “I don’t know! I told you, there are too many variables. The loss of containment could have been sabotage or someone on my team made a mistake. Maybe they were too afraid to admit their mistake. It’s possible I made a mistake and I did not recognize it as such! I’ve identified the virus signature, but the work will have to be taken up by someone else. In my opinion, we need a miracle. As a virologist who has worked with Ebola, my faith in miracles is absent. Nature doesn't know mercy or luck. That hope was beaten out of me in Africa.”

  The admiral cut in, “Look, you’re already headed for the Nobel by identifying the virus. There’s time before it reaches our shores. We have to hope — ” but the woman in the suit held up a hand and he fell silent.

  “We do appreciate the complexity of the challenge before us, Dr. Sutr. That’s why we need you. You’re further along in the research than the other labs.” The woman looked conciliatory now and her voice took on a new, soothing note. “We’re very anxious to have you continue.”

  Dr. Sutr stiffened. “I’ve already composed and sent an email for the lab network. You’ll have the entire data dump. I've made extra notes so your teams won't waste time with what hasn't worked. Dan, at CDC, and Sinjin-Smythe, at Cambridge, will coordinate my latest data to the other nodes. Good luck with it.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “You were vague about the virus gaining traction in parts of the Middle East. Have you on site confirmation, Doctor?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen the virus’s work in person. Here in Dubai, in my own house. Tarun, my baby boy, died last night. My wife, Manisha, followed to see where he went early this morning.”

  “We’re so sorry for your loss, Julian,” the woman said. “Are you infected?”

  “I have no doubt I will die soon.”

  “How long have you got, son?” the admiral said. “You’ve said the infection gradient and lethality is so variable…you could keep working. We could defeat this thing.”

  “Defeat death? I don’t have that kind of time. Don’t be afraid, though. I am an atheist…but…” His voice and gaze drifted away for a moment and it was clear to all assembled he spoke to himself more than his audience. “When I was a student, I found myself alone in a cadaver lab once. Seventeen bodies, each one in some state of dissection. I held a human heart there for the first time, still so muscular and strong for a dead thing. The iliotibial band is strong, too, like a fibrous, white leather strap…such awe-inspiring complexity in the human body. And so many damnable things to go wrong.”

  “Julian?” The woman’s voice was almost a whisper, as if she were afraid to startle him from a deep sleep.

  “Forgive me,” the virologist said. “It is not the bodies that make us prisons of sadness. We will burn and bury the bodies or Nature will claim its prizes. It is those terrible reminders of what was and what could have been that will rob us of hope. That will infuse us with such fury and sadness that, for most? There is no room for anything else. Many good people will do bad and bad men will do evil. Without hope and spires, what are aspirations for? Our losses will make us wretche
d again. My son’s unused baby booties. That is what drives me to this wretchedness.”

  “Doctor, you swore an oath and we, the living, still need you.” The general’s voice shook.

  Julian Sutr’s voice came firm and steady. “General, Admiral…Madam Secretary. It’s entirely possible that I brought it home to them. My wife and child are dead by the virus that bears my name. I should have been an obstetrician like my mother. She brought life into the world…” A tear slipped down the doctor’s cheek. He cleared his throat. “The human race has seen this before. There will be survivors. They’ll have to be strong. First, they will have to weather the storm. Whoever writes this history and to whomever shall read it…tell them to let go of their expectations of how things should be. Another Dark Age is coming. If we hold on to what we’ve lost, we’ll never be strong enough to grasp what comes next. I know I’m too weak for the trials to come.”

  “What is next?” the admiral asked.

  The doctor gave him the amused smile of a fighter relieved to be retired from fighting. “I expect blacksmithery will be the first science to make a comeback. Perhaps in a few decades. Maybe fewer. You people ask me what you should tell him. Go to your briefing. Tell him that, in all likelihood, he is the last President of the United States.”

  The general and admiral startled and looked away from their screens, but the woman’s eyes were steady on the doctor. “Do you have the fever yet, Julian?”

  “Oh, I won’t wait. I have to go looking for Manisha and Tarun.” Dr. Julian Sutr picked up the Sig Sauer P220 from his desk, placed the muzzle under his chin and pulled the trigger.

  Invisible, whimsical and losing our way

  The moon lit the boy’s face as he peered over the fence into the next yard. Jaimie Spencer watched the couple on the lawn chair. The chair’s squeak had drawn him closer, curious. He wasn’t allowed in the neighbor’s yard, but moon shadows amid thick hedge leaves concealed him. A woman he’d never seen before sat in the older man’s lap. The man, Mr. Sotherby, lay still beneath her. Jaimie could not see the man’s face, but there was something grim about him, as if the couple were reluctant joggers in a cold wind. A cool hand slipped to the back of the boy’s neck. Without looking, Jaimie knew it was his sister, Anna.

  “Ears,” she whispered, “You’re being creepy again.”

  The woman froze and turned her head. The couple whispered to each other, too. Sotherby’s voice was insistent. Hers was afraid.

  Anna guided her little brother away from the hedge line. Anna did not speak again until she and Jaimie stood by their own back door. “Mr. Sotherby has brought home another one of his flight attendant friends. You shouldn’t spy on them. It’s wrong.”

  Jaimie did not look at Anna directly. He never met her eyes and he rarely spoke. Her brother cocked his head slightly to one side. That questioning gesture was a rare bit of Jaimie’s body language that few outside the family could read easily. Anna told Jaimie that when he cocked his head that way, he looked like Fetcher, the cocker spaniel they’d once had. In every picture they owned of that pet, the spaniel’s head was tipped slightly sideways, perplexed by the camera. Jaimie thought the entire breed must cock their heads slightly sideways, hence their name. The boy loved when language was precise and logical. He was often disappointed.

  “Mr. Sotherby brings home his friends. Remember Mr. Sotherby’s a pilot? He gives rides to lots of people, Ears. He was just giving her a ride. That woman you saw thought she was part of a couple, but they were really just coupling.”

  Couple: a noun and a verb. Jaimie had read these words in his dictionary. Overlaps of meanings and terms irritated him. He wondered if his sister was trying to bother him. Anna often called him Ears when she was angry with him, though sometimes she called him that when she gave him a hug. More confusion and imprecision.

  “Dad says it’s a terrible thing what’s happened to flight attendants,” Anna said. “He says when they were called stewardesses, they were cuter. Now the older ones have a waxy look.”

  Jaimie wondered how the change in the name of their occupation could have changed the way they looked. He’d heard there were magic words. “Flight attendant” must have powerful, and dangerous, magical properties.

  Anna pulled her little brother into the house. “Let’s keep this between you and me,” Anna said and then burst out in a giggle. “Mom would worry you’re getting corrupted. I won’t say anything and I know you won’t.”

  Jaimie followed Anna up the back stairs into the kitchen. She pulled out a box of cereal and poured a bowl for herself and one for her brother. He never asked to eat but was usually cooperative if a bowl and spoon was placed in front of him.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Sotherby and the woman. Jaimie liked to watch colorful patterns that flowed around people. He had seen the colors around living things all of his life. He assumed everyone saw them. The boy had seen something pass between Mr. Sotherby and the flight attendant he had never before seen. It was disturbing because it muddied their colors and made them less vibrant.

  Jaimie stood at the sink and gazed out of the kitchen window as he ate. The moon hung so low and full, the tip of a distant church spire reached, its tip stretching to split Clavius, a large crater toward the base of the moon’s face. The boy’s mind wandered over the words spire and aspire. Surely, the terms shared the same arrogant word root. But the spire would always be bound to the Earth, many miles short of aspiration’s heights. The gap between hope and doomed reality turned the boy’s mind back to the naked woman in the next yard.

  Small black spots had hovered between the pair like greasy flies. The black smear spoiled the usual pleasing weave of colors. There had been many of them, like a cloud of feeding insects, around the woman. They spread over Mr. Sotherby, too, reaching for him. Jaimie didn’t know what the black spots were, but he sensed a yearning and purpose in their movement. They aspired to reach Mr. Sotherby and overtake him. He sensed the black cloud’s aspirations would be fulfilled.

  That was Jaimie Spencer’s first glimpse of the Sutr virus at its deadly work. He was sixteen. He might have mentioned it to someone, but Jaimie Spencer was a selective mute. His mother didn’t like that label so she called it, “How Jaimie is.”

  “He’s a very selective mute,” his father, Theo Spencer, said. “Jaimie has something we all lack: A super power. My son can shut up until he has something to say.”

  But Jaimie’s ability to communicate well still waited on a distant time horizon then. Billions would have to expire — and one death would have to transpire — before Jaimie found his voice.

  Toast Fortune's smiles and fever dreams

  The letter arrived in the late morning. Jaimie’s father worked in a small library branch. Jaimie was home because the School Board and the Health Board were “in discussions” about whether children should be kept at home. Officials debated if masks should be worn while others insisted masks were too uncomfortable for children to wear all day.

  Jaimie heard his parents debating, too. Jack, his mother, said she was keeping him home because she didn’t want to be alone in the house. (She was “Jacqueline” to very few people, and to no one who knew her well.)

  If Jaimie had chosen to speak, he would have said, “We’re always alone.”

  Jack hugged her son and he let her because it pleased her. Jaimie knew she wanted him to speak and he occasionally pushed a word or two up past his throat, each like a stone forced through a narrow gap. Jaimie sensed his mother wanted something more from him now, but the boy couldn’t guess what that might be. He ate his cereal dry from the box as she read the letter. She glanced up at him as she read, as if to make sure he was still in his seat at the kitchen table, and safe. Her hands trembled and Jaimie suspected this was a good time to say something. No words came.

  Jaimie did not speak at all until he was six and then he spoke, or rather sang, words in perfect pitch. His mother credited John Lennon for her son’s first m
iracle. After all the cajoling by many frustrated therapists and teachers, it was John Lennon who stirred Jaimie to vocalize for the first time.

  “Everyone loved the Beatles,” Jack said. “Somehow we never noticed that much of it is excellent children’s music.” The song was Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Jack did not hear Jaimie’s first words. He sang for Anna and only his sister heard him. She whooped and leapt in the air shouting for their mother to come hear Jaimie sing those two nonsense words over and over. He never began the lyrics, as if singing the title should be enough after so long a silence.

  Jack ran upstairs and slapped her daughter. “What a mean lie!” The red outline of Jack’s fingers tattooed her cheek, including the thin outline of her wedding ring. She had never done such a thing until that moment.

  Jaimie listened to the echo of the slap bounce off the bedroom wall. To him, the slap ended with a thin shine, the color of mustard. His mother’s energies shone bright red. His sister shone yellow and crimson.

  Anna screamed and whirled on Jaimie, insisting the little boy sing Ob-La-Di again. She was only two years older than her brother. She didn’t know the surest way to shut up a selective mute is to insist he speak.

  Anna was still jailed in her room, long after supper, when Jaimie sang another Beatles title. This time it was Taxman. He sang the title absentmindedly as he spun a plastic bowl on the kitchen floor, watching the after images flutter to the hollow sound as the bowl circled and shuddered to a stop.

  Jack dropped and shattered a plate, wept and squeezed the six-year-old tight. That became what the rest of the family remembered, the agreed-upon and official story. However, Jaimie knew the dishes had been shattered in the sink in the late afternoon as Anna and his mother fought. Jack threw the first plate in the sink as she washed it. Anna threw the second. Jaimie listened to the screams. He caught the familiar, accusatory tone people use when they shout the same things over and over, conveying more energy than information.