This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) Read online

  No one was in charge. The world had become cacoplastic.

  * * *

  The siege was harder for Anna. Book glue held Jaimie together while the television tore her apart. Dr. Karen Glass and Franklin Jones died in front of her eyes.

  Dr. Glass reported from India on the outbreak. She died in a huge tent — like a circus top, but filthy green — surrounded by hundreds of corpses arranged in rows of army cots. As she died on international television — the crawl along the bottom of the screen read: LIVE. She was immortalized on film with her last ratcheting breath. Anna watched it, tears rolling down her cheeks, whispering, “I watched her report…yesterday. She seemed fine just yesterday! She seemed fine!”

  A sound technician, a pretty brown woman wearing khakis and boots, held the correspondent’s limp body, crying and kissing Dr. Glass’s white forehead and mouth.

  “Karen! Oh, Karen!” she said, over and over.

  The sound was muffled. Wind whipped at the microphone. The thick audio feed somehow made the scene more real.

  “That woman must have loved her so much,” Anna said. “It’s suicide, kissing her bare face like that. She’ll get Sutr next!”

  Jack watched the screen with her daughter. “I never guessed Dr. Karen Glass was a lesbian.”

  “Mother!”

  “What? I’m just saying I didn’t know. Did you know?”

  “It’s not supposed to matter, Mom.”

  “I-I’m not saying it does matter. I just…I think that’s the cameraman coughing. I wonder if her parents are watching this? It would be hell for them to get a double-barrel in the face all at once like this.”

  “Mom. Stop talking.”

  Jaimie emerged from his bedroom, lured downstairs by hunger and curiosity about what was happening on television. He found Anna in front of the television, a bag of cookies forgotten in one hand, a cookie in the other hand arrested in the air halfway to her mouth.

  “The anchorman has it, too,” Anna said.

  Franklin Jones brought the crisis into focus. His death was more than a passing distraction from all the bad news about the economy. Jones had been the daytime anchor of the biggest all-news, all-the-time network on American television. When Theo and Jack wanted to know what was going on in the world, they listened to Canadian radio or the BBC, but they turned to American television channels for video.

  Jones was a tall man with thick blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He had been a model in fashion magazines when he was younger. Sunlight and middle-age had cooked his skin rugged and made him look more intelligent. He no longer looked like the thin boy with a vacant stare.

  Jaimie didn’t pay much attention to television news programs, but Jones’s accent captured him. Even through the television, his voice rolled out across the living room and the boy watched the sound waves break around him as the newsman spoke. The color was a rich blue but the edge in his vowels made sharp white mountain peaks. Jack loved his voice, too. She said he was British via Vermont.

  He sat behind the anchor desk eulogizing Dr. Karen Glass’s sacrifice. She “served her nation and the truth,” Jones said.

  Jaimie looked up from his Latin phrase book. He paid closer attention to the anchor when he noticed the white peaks were gone from his voice. The edges around his tone were softer and weaker.

  Jones lost his place and began the same sentence again. He stopped. “We’re going to take a break now and go to commercial.” He put his hand to his ear, but the camera stayed on him. He was fumbling with his earpiece when he went to the floor. Muffled voices shouted off-screen.

  While the camera stayed on the newsman in the studio, an inset square at the bottom of the screen showed a confused female reporter in a bright red jacket. She stood in front of a Red Cross centre in Idaho. The color of her jacket matched the Red Cross symbol on the building behind her perfectly. Jaimie wondered if she meant to do that.

  The woman held a microphone under her chin and repeated, “Frank? Frank? Frank?”

  Jones rolled on the floor by the anchor desk. Muffled voices from the studio control room argued back and forth but the cameraman seemed intent on keeping the camera trained on Jones. A wire under his shirt pulled taut as he flailed and his shirt-tail was yanked back, exposing the white flesh of his belly. Though he wore a suit jacket, behind the desk he had been wearing sweatpants with white fluorescent stripes down the side of each leg.

  “Frank?” the woman from Idaho asked. “Tina, have we lost the feed — ?”

  She held one hand to her ear and continued to speak, but her sound was muted. That was fine with Jaimie. She had a grating sound in her voice he hadn’t noticed before, like metal on metal. He decided that in the confusion, the reporter had ceased to use her fake professional reporter’s voice and had started speaking naturally.

  Two men wearing headsets came forward, knelt and spoke to Jones. They all called him Frank, which sounded odd because Jaimie never thought of him as one short staccato sound. His sure, suntanned face had always been underlined with the three authoritative syllables of his name: Franklin Jones.

  Franklin vomited on a big man in a white shirt. It looked like pea soup. Jaimie opened his dictionary and looked up “vomit”, “nausea” and “nauseous”. The small dictionary didn’t list projectile vomiting, though later that’s what his mother said it was. Jaimie also found the word “puke”.

  The man who had been thrown up on ripped off his shirt. The man ran off camera while Franklin Jones, now just Frank, asked for an ambulance. His mic was still working and Jaimie’s sensitive ear was not necessary to detect how weariness and fear competed for supremacy.

  A sharp-faced woman in jeans came on camera and knelt beside him, cradling his head carefully. She held a wet towel and wiped Frank’s green chin. She had a headset, too. Though young, she seemed to be in charge.

  Jaimie thought she was impressive, the way she spoke so calmly while others shouted in the background. She asked for three volunteers: a driver, a cameraperson and, as an afterthought, “C’mon, I need a sound tech.”

  There seemed to be a debate going on offstage and then she said, “If one of you doesn’t step up, you’re both out of a job. Now!” Apparently that worked because the off-camera voices settled and she gave someone off camera a curt nod.

  “Ambulance,” Frank said.

  The woman told him all the ambulances were busy but she would make sure he got help. He nodded and began to throw up again. She turned him on his side, away from the eye of the camera.

  “Oh, c’mon!” Anna said, her cookie still forgotten in her hand. “Don’t spare us television history!”

  The sharp-faced woman barked more orders and soon a fit young man with a stretcher appeared. From their exchange, it became clear her name was Beth. Beth grabbed Frank under the heels while the young man, named Chip, hauled Frank on the stretcher. “He’s burning up,” Chip said in a high pink voice that felt like pencil erasers poking at the skin of Jaimie’s forearms.

  “Stay with us,” Beth said, as they wheeled Frank off the set. It was strange seeing the television studio from this perspective. There was exposed lumber behind the façade of the stage where the news had been delivered. Jaimie realized the television news set was a theater. Seeing the man carried out through a long hallway reminded the boy of a Latin stage direction. Exuent means They leave the stage. Exuent omnes. They all leave the stage.

  The camera bounced along behind Beth and, though they’d never heard her on camera before, she began narrating the race to the parking lot. She breathed heavily as she spoke. “To bring new viewers up to speed,” she said, “news anchor Franklin Jones has collapsed on the set. Due to his symptoms, we’re assuming this is the Sutr Flu which we’ve been reporting on almost exclusively. Franklin mentioned he wasn’t feeling very well this morning and I asked him about it but he just said, ‘The show must go on,’ and so it did until he collapsed behind the CNN news desk just moments ago.”

&n
bsp; Chip backed up against a steel door and when they pushed through it a piercing alarm sounded. Someone said, “Jesus!”

  “I bet that was the sound guy,” Anna said.

  “Sorry about that folks,” Beth said smoothly as they emerged into sunlight. The sound of the door alarm retreated behind them. “We’re taking the quickest route to the parking lot so we can load our colleague into a van from the pool and get him medical care as quickly as possible.”

  The camera man tripped and gray pavement flashed across the screen before he could right himself. “Stay with us,” Beth said smoothly, as if she expected the gaffe.

  They stopped at a high steel gate and in the background a guard could be glimpsed talking with Chip. Beth turned, breathing hard and looking pale, despite the calm assurance her voice conveyed. “We’re going to follow Frank as far as we can into the nearest hospital. The coverage of the Sutr Flu crisis has taken a very personal turn with the CNN family today. If you were watching earlier you saw CNN’s own Dr. Karen Glass die in a treatment center in rural India. It seems this virus knows no borders and we’ll of course continue to provide you with the latest news as this crisis unfolds.”

  “Holy shit!” Anna said.

  “Language!” Theo called from the dining room table in the next room. They hadn’t known his father was listening until he’d spoken.

  “Uh-huh,” Anna said, finally remembering the cookie in her hand. She shoved it into her mouth whole.

  “I’m serious,” Theo said. “When your brother does talk, I don’t want his vocabulary to be limited to your swearing.”

  Anna looked back at Jaimie sitting cross-legged in the big leather recliner with the dictionary in his lap. “Yeah, that’s a likely problem.” She mouthed the word “shit” (and several other words at Jaimie) before turning back to CNN.

  “We know from authorities that no ambulances are available, as it is in most American cities at the moment. Paramedic crews have found themselves overwhelmed by demand and many have failed to report to work. We’ve been told that flu victims are arriving at treatment centers with the help of friends or family members. Bus services everywhere are cancelled for fear of spreading the virus through too much close contact with people who may be infected and not yet know it.”

  By his gestures, Chip seemed to be arguing with the anonymous security guard behind her. The camera shifted focus to Chip and the guard as Beth recounted Jones’s collapse.

  “Of course, if you do feel unwell, authorities are urging you to stay home. Tamiflu and Relenza stocks are currently depleted in North America though as was reported earlier by our news team, Germany and France are said to be hoarding huge stocks of the anti-virus for their populations, ramping up tensions between these traditionally cooperative American allies.”

  The security guard ran off screen. The camera followed the guard’s retreat.

  Someone said, “Sonofabitch!”

  “Sound guy, again!” Anna said, spraying black cookie crumbs.

  Beth glanced back at the camera, not missing a beat. “We’re going to get a van here in a moment and make our way to the nearest hospital. We’ll show you how the health care system is working for all of us from the inside.”

  Chip pulled out a cell phone. Beth’s composure remained undented. “We’ll cut away for a message from our sponsors and when we come back, we’ll follow Franklin Jones as he meets with doctors and give you a front row seat. We’ll be right back.”

  Things didn’t work out as quickly as Beth planned. Anna and Jaimie kept watching but when a long string of commercials ended, an Asian woman they didn’t recognize sat behind the anchor desk. They showed Jones collapse repeatedly and when they tired of that, they went back to showing Dr. Glass’s demise in India.

  Beth didn’t return to the screen for two hours. This time when she appeared, she looked harried. She stood, mic in hand, in front of a hurricane fence. Print at the bottom of the screen now identified her as Elizabeth Harrison, CNN producer.

  She recounted the story of the anchor’s collapse at his desk, which by then had already been aired many times, including several times in slow motion. A vertical take-off jet lifted off a runway behind her.

  “Our volunteer crew took Franklin to two different hospitals. There was a line outside of each emergency department and people were not being admitted to either hospital. A spokesperson for one of the hospitals said they were only allowing people into the emergency room who were still ambulatory.”

  Theo, who listened from the kitchen while he prepared dinner, stepped into the living room. He frowned at the screen. “Did she say they were only allowing people in who could walk in? Isn’t that…the opposite of what it should be?”

  “Not if they’ve given up on the ones lying down,” Jack said.

  Theo gave his wife a sharp look. Jaimie sensed his irritation and her fear. They might have fought, but they couldn’t take their eyes from Elizabeth Harrison.

  Her sharp face looked gray, as if it had been several sleepless nights, not hours, since she’d been in the television studio. Her calm and control had evaporated. “I explained at each hospital that our colleague had collapsed but the health official,” — she hit the words ‘health official’ extra hard — “said that even if they were to allow Frank in, there were no beds available.”

  Jaimie’s right index finger hovered between radness (meaning fear) and radoub (referring to preparing a ship for a voyage.) Jaimie couldn’t see the future, but watching the screen, this pair of words felt right together. It was as if the word wizards who wrote the dictionary were giving him a subtle hint of what was to come.

  “It’s worse than we’ve been told, isn’t it?” Theo said to Jack, not so loud that Anna could hear.

  “It’s as bad as Cliff predicted.”

  “At least it’s not here!” Anna called from the kitchen. “I bet all the celebrities are going to a secret bunker on the north and south poles or something.”

  Jack and Theo looked troubled but said nothing.

  The camera zoomed in for a close-up on Beth. “At last, we were directed to a Sutr Flu Treatment Center in hangers at LAX. The National Guard is here, as is the Red Cross. I also saw several FEMA and Center for Disease Control vehicles by the gate. National Guard soldiers in gas masks took Franklin out of our news van and placed him on a stretcher. I asked to speak to someone in charge and was refused. I asked for a mask so I could stay with Franklin and that was also refused. When I insisted, a National Guardsman pointed his rifle in my face. He didn’t say anything. He just waved me away. The last I saw Franklin…I’m…concerned.”

  “Why do media people talk like that?” Theo asked. “She’s not ‘concerned’. She’s out of her mind terrified.”

  Jack picked up the remote from the floor and turned off the television. “Let’s give it a rest, shall we?”

  “Mom! TV is what there is to do! What else is there?”

  “You’ve got a pile of books up in your room and dinner is soon so stop with the snacking.”

  Anna went red-faced. “We can’t all be like Ears, climbing inside a book and hiding there.”

  “Room!” Jack ordered.

  Anna stomped up the stairs. Jack looked at Jaimie. Three lines formed on his mother’s forehead. Anna slammed her bedroom door.

  Jaimie moved his index finger down to the definition of “Ragnarok”. It was a Norse myth that told of the destruction of gods and humankind in a battle with evil. He liked the soft edges of a Latin phrase he’d found better. Ancient sailors believed the end of the world waited only six hours’ sail from Britain. They called it ultima Thule. The end of the world.

  No wine, no roses, no time to play

  Jaimie awoke to yelling downstairs. The lamp on the nightstand still shone and the Latin dictionary lay open by his head. The last phrase he had read was an interesting one: ubi solitudenum faciunt pacem appellant. They create desolation and call it peace. To the boy, the words tast
ed soft and were as pleasing to his eye as they were black and dangerous.

  He was afraid to move at first. He hadn’t heard angry shouting like this since the day he sang his first words. He lay still until the banging started. There was a pause between each high metallic report, as if someone was winding up between each tinny crash.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” That was Anna.

  Jaimie leaped from his bed and ran to the top of the stairs, peering down into the well of light in the front hallway. His mother stood behind Anna, pinning her arms behind her back and pulling her toward the kitchen. He came down a few more steps, trying to understand what he saw.

  “Stop! Stop it now!” His father’s silhouette was framed in the open front door. The screen door was closed, but the thin metal square at its bottom had been mostly kicked in. Someone Jaimie could not see stood on the front step.

  Bang!

  “Stop it. This is already over. You just don’t know it.” His father’s voice was even, but Jaimie could see his secret. He sounded like Beth, the woman on the television. Red streams of bright anger ran down his arms and out of his fingers, but a yellow ribbon of fear wrapped tight around his heart.

  Jaimie crept down a few more stairs so he could see who was kicking the screen door. It was Trent Howser.

  “Anna wants to be with me! You don’t have the right to stop her!”

  “She’s my daughter and if you care for her the way you say you do, you’ll leave,” Dad said.

  Bang! A hinge popped loose on the screen. Trent was eighteen, strong and on the wrestling team. If he had thought to grab the door and yank it, it would have flown into the front hedge. Instead, he kicked it again.

  “I’ve already called the police, Trent!” Jack yelled. “You’d better go before they get here!” That was the third lie Jaimie had heard his mother tell, and so close on the heels of the last one.

  Bang!

  The bottom hinge floated out and free of the door frame and the flimsy screen’s lock popped useless.