This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 6

Screams from bystanders went up first. Then sirens. Before the first ambulance arrived, Sinjin-Smythe was already blocks away, removing the battery from his cell phone as he ran.

  * * *

  The woman in red found a comfortable seat in an empty pub just off Piccadilly Circus. Despite the warnings, plenty of people wandered about outside in the sunshine. There were no tourists — they had all rushed home before the airlines were grounded. However, Londoners came and went, tired of their government’s requests that they stay indoors to avoid spreading the flu.

  The woman sat, waiting. She didn’t have to wait long. A man in an ill-fitting, black leather jacket sauntered in and sat beside her. He ordered a Heineken.

  “Buy a lady a drink?”

  The man glanced down her body. “Pardon me for saying so, but a person in your condition shouldn’t be drinking, should they?”

  She shrugged. “It’s the best time. The baby isn’t going to make it. And I just left my fiancee this morning.”

  “Oh, my god!” the man said. He handed her his beer. “You’ve had it, haven’t you, love? Beastly! He couldn’t handle losing the baby, is that it?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re not wrong. Always is.”

  “Thank you for the beer. I think I’ll drink this. Then I’ll chew on something. Then I’ll switch to Fosters. What’s your name?”

  “Pete. Pete Grimsby.” He offered his hand and, as she extended hers, he pulled back. “Oh, that’s a nasty cut, you have there.” He looked at her hand and grimaced. “It’s not your day at all, is it?”

  “A pet bit me. It’s fine. Do you have a big family, Pete?”

  “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. Since the plague, what with the economy, I lost my job. We’re all packed in tight in one house. Had to get away to preserve my sanity.” The man glanced at her swollen belly again and squirmed in his seat. “S’cuse me. It’s bad form to be complaining to you about family right now, isn’t it?”

  She patted his hand. “No worries. None at all anymore.”

  He withdrew his hand discreetly and raised it to get the bartender’s attention. “Have a cold Fosters ready for the lady, Kenny!” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, most of us lost our jobs. I got a couple of brothers — Leland and Vannever — in the police. They support the rest. If not for them, things would be dire.”

  “I see.”

  “In times like these, well…any chance you going back to your man?”

  “None.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t have to do anything anymore. I’ll do as I please.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’ve been doing research for years. I’m going into education next.”

  “Teaching, you mean? What will you teach?”

  She smiled. “I’ll show you.” She pointed to her throat. “Kiss me gently, here.”

  Pete straightened in his chair. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Darlin’, you’ve had a tough morning. It wouldn’t be very gentlemanly —”

  She slapped him, hard and fast, across the face. The bartender’s head came up. “Do I need to come down there and sort you two out?”

  Pete was more startled than hurt. “I’m fine, but this one is crazy!”

  Her arm flashed out again and grabbed the man by the hair at the back of his head. She pulled him off balance, toward her. “Kiss my throat!”

  He did as he was told, she released him and he let out a laugh.

  “That’s good, Pete. Lovely. Thank you.”

  “What’s your name, crazy lady?”

  She looked at the floor and smiled demurely. “This morning it was Keres. But now, I think I’ll call myself…Shiva.”

  “You do have an exotic look. It fits.”

  “Thank you, Pete. Let me educate you. After this, you can go tell your big family the big news.” Before he could puzzle that out, she moved to embrace him. She kissed his throat, just over the jugular vein, softly. Then she wrapped her arms around him so python tight, he felt the baby kick. It kicked so hard against her belly and his, it felt like the baby must be drowning.

  “Shiva, we shouldn’t —” he wheezed.

  “I’ll just take a tiny nip,” she whispered seductively. “One bite is best for now.” Her teeth clamped on the meat of the muscle in his neck and she shook her head as she ripped away a chunk.

  Pete Grimsby howled and pushed her back, his hands clasping the wound. His eyes went huge as he watched the blood and gore drip from the woman’s chin. She smiled wider, showing red teeth.

  “Careful to wash your hands, Pete. You wouldn’t want that to get infected.” The pistol in her hand pointed at his crotch. “Run.”

  The bartender was about to run, too, but she leaned over the bar and shot him in the leg, just below the knee. “Don’t hobble off before you bring me another Fosters. I’m drinking for two.” She wiped her chin with a napkin. “Wow! Pete was salty.”

  The bartender winced, swallowed his scream and did as he was told. She looked behind the bar. Pictures on the wall showed the bartender as a younger, thinner man in uniform. Medals hung in a box by the mirror.

  “So, you were a soldier?”

  “Yes. I was.”

  “I am,” she said. “Before I let you go, I’m going to spit in a glass. You’re going to fill it with water and you are going to drink it. Then run, as best you can, and tell everyone you meet about the morning you met Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds.”

  God doesn't mind dirty tables and broken chairs

  The next morning Jaimie woke early to birds chirping, the blare of radio voices and his next-door neighbor singing louder than usual. Mrs. Marjorie Bendham, intent on her task, seemed to ignore the radio as she turned her flower bed with a hoe. She trilled up and down like she was trying to drown out the radio. She had been a soprano when she was young and, though she was very old now, she rarely stopped singing, even when her voice grew so weak and low, she dropped to a whisper.

  She and her husband Al spent a lot of time in their backyard by the pool. Mrs. Bendham practiced scales and occasionally an aria. Jaimie did not understand Italian, but he appreciated the clear violets and blues and greens that floated out as she sang. There was something different in her voice today, a sharp yellow quaver Jaimie hadn’t heard before. It seemed everyone’s aura was dominated by yellow, if it wasn’t already infected black. Only Anna’s angry reds — “mean reds” he’d read in one of her high school books — seemed to run on the high energy of an inexhaustible fuel of emotion and gritted teeth.

  Jaimie moved to the window and watched the old woman putter among her empty flower beds, disturbing gardens of dirt aimlessly. The best, clear notes sailed out as usual, but the irritating yellow vibrated and hovered, disappearing and returning around the edges of the blue sounds. Her aura was usually a muddied green and a dirty mustard yellow around her hips and knees. When she sang opera, her colors deepened to richer hues. Jaimie could feel the emotions she conveyed with her songs. Mostly, they were laments. The dictionary said a lament is for something lost, but didn’t specify what. If he were a talker, Jaimie would have asked Mrs. Bendham. He wondered what she had lost.

  Al Bendham was a quiet man who had worked for the government though he never said how. Jack once asked exactly what his old job had been as they chatted over the fence. He just shrugged and said, “Nothing much.”

  The old man was blind, which interested Jaimie since the boy saw more in the auras of others than he felt. Jaimie felt blind in his own way because the motivations of others were so often opaque to him. Despite his vast vocabulary, it seemed people had a secret language within a language. Words had too many hidden meanings and subtle implications.

  For instance, at school, his teacher often lectured him about “boundaries” if he stepped too close to another student. However, boundaries were elastic things that seemed to vary by individual and circumstance. Birthday cake was good to share,
but he was forbidden from eating another student’s lunch. People, Jaimie decided, were disorganized and ruled by too many variables.

  Since Jaimie saw more than he felt, he wondered if Mr. Bendham felt more than he could see. The neighbor spent hours listening to the radio as he vacuumed his pool. Though the radio sat on the ledge behind the screen of his kitchen window, it was turned up loud. As he vacuumed, his great head of shaggy white hair was always cocked slightly toward it. He looked like an old lion at the zoo, pacing and waiting, but with no apparent purpose beyond pacing and waiting.

  Sometimes Jaimie spied on Mr. Bendham as he did Mr. Sotherby. He rarely saw Sotherby unless he spotted him mowing his lawn or playing the bouncing game with his flight attendant friends. From Jaimie’s bedroom window, he watched the blind man vacuum the pool. He never seemed in a hurry and the boy found that soothing. The old man frequently cleaned the same spot in the deep end repeatedly, either not knowing when he was done or not caring.

  The boy watched the blind man’s aura. The energy was curiously disorganized at the back of his head. From a medical dictionary, the boy knew there was something faulty in the old man’s occipital lobe — something that betrayed his vision. Jaimie watched and waited for him to pick his nose or dig in his ears. When he found boogers, he rolled them between his fingers and flicked them into the pool. After he dug in his ears, he smelled under his fingernails, checking for ear wax. The boy knew he was forbidden to do that, but the old man was allowed. More mysteries of human behavior. Sometimes, Jaimie wondered if he was something other than human on safari on a strange planet with customs no outsider could hope to decipher.

  Mostly, Jaimie watched the old man’s haphazard patterns as Al Bendham pushed the long vacuum cleaner pole around the bottom of his pool. He decided the appearance of action was more important to the blind man than actually cleaning the pool. He and Mrs. Bendham dog-paddled around in it occasionally in the evening, and sometimes their fat son (a real estate agent, Dad said) brought their little grandchildren, twin girls, over for a swim when the summer heatwaves hit.

  Jaimie waited. Though the radio blared, Mr. Bendham did not appear. The boy opened his bedroom window. Cold air spilled over him. However, his mother was already in the backyard, planting seeds.

  Mrs. Bendham stopped what she was doing and called over, “It’s not too early for most things, but if you’ve got tomato plants, you should wait till the May long weekend! You’ll have to wrap whatever sprouts in plastic for a while. We’ll have a couple frosts yet! The weather is crazy!”

  Jack stood, dusted off the knees of her pants and walked toward Mrs. Bendham, though not so far as the fence.

  Mrs. Bendham smiled, her face tightening into more seams, wrinkles and lines. “You’re up early, today, Jacqueline.”

  His mother gave a jerky nod. “Haven’t slept much in two nights. You’re up early, too.”

  “Yes. I hope my radio doesn’t disturb you. Mr. Bendham doesn’t feel like getting up this morning but he does love his radio. Sometimes I get so sick of it, I turn it to classical. He objects, but he seems quite dedicated to lying down at the moment.”

  “He okay?”

  “He’ll be fine. Just a little hot. He insisted we go to the hospital last week. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but he complains he’s feeling poorly ever since.”

  “Oh?”

  Jaimie was confused. His mother’s voice sounded neutral, but her colors yellowed more. He thought if he stood beside her, he’d taste lemon juice. The boy was glad he was safe in his flannel pajamas. He instinctively drew back from the window, not so much to avoid being seen as to watch from a safer distance.

  “…nothing serious,” Mrs. Bendham said. “He had a checkup at the prostate clinic. Some follow-up scans and blood work. I thought we should wait, but his surgery last year scared him so he wanted to be sure everything was fine. He’s the anxious type. I tell him most of what we worry about never happens. Al always says most of what we worry about eventually happens. Since the surgery, it’s like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop on his head.”

  Jaimie knew about the surgery. Last winter he’d gone next door with his father to shovel the driveway and the Bendham’s walk after a snowstorm. Theo said that in Maine, they’d use snow shovels, but heavy snowfall was rare in Kansas City, Missouri. Instead, they used garden shovels to clear the driveway and shivered in the surprising cold.

  “Weather patterns are changing,” Theo complained. “Even from when I was a kid I see a big change. The meteorologist’s predictions can’t be depended upon anymore. With climate change, the scientists say we can expect crazy storms, droughts, flooding and worse as the world heats up. I know it doesn’t feel hotter today, but more heat means more evaporation which means more precipitation, so more killer storms and tornadoes. Seems like governments can’t do anything besides blow things up anymore. Used to be, a debate would end. Now the arguments go on forever and the big problems never get solved.”

  When they were done clearing the walk, father and son stepped inside the Bendham’s house to ask if the old couple needed groceries. Every lamp had a lacy bit of cloth under it. The house had a smell Jaimie associated with the dwellings of old people. Thinking of it brought back boiled cabbage doused in lavender queasiness. Perfect recall is more a curse than a gift.

  Fresh from the hospital, Mr. Bendham lay on a flowery couch, a jug of green juice on a TV tray beside him. He was the most chatty Jaimie had seen him, like he was just back from an adventure and anxious to repeat it before he’d forgotten anything. Later, the boy looked up the words “retropubic prostatectomy”. Then he looked it up on the Internet. The boy started eating more tomatoes after watching a YouTube video of the surgery. Something in the tomato was supposed to protect men’s prostates from blowing up like a balloon and killing them. It sounded like a strange design flaw to Jaimie. The fact that a tomato could be considered a fruit by botanists and a vegetable by cooks bothered him almost as much.

  “Al was in such a rush to get his checkup,” Mrs. Bendham said, “but I don’t know when we’ll get any results. Did you hear? There are a lot of doctors and nurses who are refusing to report to work. When we were there, the hospital was packed with people, but I didn’t see many white coats. There was a lot of coughing going on and the triage nurse told everyone with a fever to go home.”

  Jack wasn’t standing close to Mrs. Bendham. It was as if they were calling back and forth across a wide stream. Still, Jaimie noticed his mother take another step back.

  “A few years ago, the government tried to get the doctors and nurses to sign a pledge to go to work if there was ever a pandemic,” his mother said. “As I remember, they refused. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  “It’s all over the radio now,” Mrs. Bendham said. “Half the callers are saying they should get back where they’re needed and the doctors are saying that for this to blow over, everybody should stay home. They are doctors, so I think they should go to work. Whatever risk there is, they chose it.”

  “Yeah, but their husbands and wives and sons and daughters didn’t choose that risk.”

  Mrs. Bendham seemed about to speak but thought better of it.

  “I should get back to the garden,” Jack said.

  “You’ve bitten off quite a bit of yard there. What are you planting, Jacqueline?”

  “Oh, lots of flowers and green things,” she tossed back over her shoulder. “I’ve decided to take this time to work on my green thumb.”

  That was the second lie Jaimie heard his mother speak.

  At the end of the world and miles away

  Jaimie retreated to the books laid out on his bed. He leafed through the pages, comparing the new one from the library to the thick, old one his father bought at a yard sale. His father had reinforced the binding with gray duct tape. Until the Sutr Virus came, his life had been regimented. The doctors said he would do better in school if he knew what to expect.
Now no one knew what to expect and so, very little was required of him. Jaimie disappeared into the words on the page, surrounding himself with alphabetized columns and walls. There was no boredom. Only hunger, sleep and the need to go to the bathroom could drag him from Word World.

  Sometimes he looked into one word and the richness of another word waiting nearby would pull him in to taste its curves and softness — words with more than one s or m often felt like dark chocolate in his mouth.

  Jaimie closed his eyes and pointed at a random page of the thickest dictionary. His finger found cacophony. To the Greeks, the word connoted not merely a harsh sound, but something evil. In medicine, it referred to an altered state of voice. In music, a combination of discordant sounds. School had often been a cacophony for Jaimie, but he could not detect evil. The ambient sounds in his classroom had been more like the musical definition, loud at times, but organized around lesson plans, bells and learning new things.

  Next to cacophony, cacoplastic waited. The term referred to pathology, “susceptible to a low degree of organization.” Since the Sutr Virus, the neighborhood had become quiet. It was certainly much quieter than the bedlam his classroom could descend to, but the quiet was more disturbing. He saw no one on the sidewalk in front of his house and traffic on his once busy suburban drive was rare.

  The Greeks were wrong, Jaimie decided. It was the quiet that held evil. He couldn’t see them, but he suspected everyone was hiding in their homes, waiting to see what came next. “It’s like everyone’s holding their breath,” his father remarked at breakfast. Jaimie recognized the phrase as an idiom he’d heard before, but he still didn’t understand it. One could only hold his breath for so long and then, if the Sutr Virus’s greasy black wasps invaded your energy field, what could one do but breathe them in and feel the aura drain of light?

  Jaimie dismissed the thought and delved further into the big dictionary. He got stuck on some words. Many times he could puzzle out definitions but it wasn’t clear to him how they could be used in an actual sentence. He chased the trail of definitions, going from one word he didn’t understand to the next, skipping around the dictionary.