“Amen, Rev,” the Kid says.
Anne returns from her sponge bath and nudges the Kid’s shoulder.
“Here’s that new toothbrush.”
Outside, they hear the howl of the Infected and the tramp of hundreds of feet. Distant gunshots and screams. Then it is so quiet they can hear the blood rushing through their veins. In the dim light of a lantern, Ethan accepts a sleeping pill from Wendy and dry swallows it. He lies on his bedroll in a T-shirt and shorts and relives his last conversation with his wife and child, and then becomes groggy. His last coherent thought before falling into a deep sleep is a vague recollection of a Greek myth in which sleep and death are brothers.
His nightmares are exhausting trials of lurid colors and feelings, extremes of good and evil, and symbols of guilt. He finally dreams of a warm evening at home, his wife pink and happy in a cherry bathrobe, holding their daughter on her lap in a rocking chair next to the toddler bed. The familiar ritual of getting ready for sleep. But the walls turn dark and sooty with ash and cluttered with graffiti tags and photos of missing children. A bullet hole appears in the window behind his wife’s head. She is still smiling as she smells her daughter’s hair, but her face has turned gray, her mouth and chin stained black. His little girl is not moving. He does not know if she is breathing.
His wife licks the back of her head, as if grooming her. As if tasting her.
FLASHBACK: Ethan Bell
Nine days ago, Ethan woke up in an empty bed with his heart pounding against his ribs. He found his wife in the bathroom, putting on mascara in front of the mirror with her mouth open, while Mary sat on the floor imitating her. Ever since the Screaming three days earlier, he found himself panicking when he did not know where his family was. He suffered nightmares in which they fell down screaming. He tried not to think of his students who actually did.
“I need coffee,” he said. “Where are you going, hon?” He added a quick wave and grin at his daughter. “Hi, Mary!”
“Work,” said Carol. “I have to work today.”
“Hi Daddy,” said Mary.
“But you weren’t going to go to work until Thursday.”
“Uh, today is Thursday, Ethan.”
“No,” he said, then smiled broadly for Mary, who was suddenly staring at him acutely, worried that he was upset. “You should stay home again today. A lot of people are doing that.”
“Ethan, we talked about this,” his wife said, her own smile genuine. “We’re all still freaked out but the country has to get moving again. Too many things are up in the air. And we need money coming in. We have to eat.”
Mary said, “No talking.”
“The schools are still closed,” he pointed out.
“They need room for the screamers.”
“Don’t call them that.”
Carol snorted. “You actually want me to call them SEELS?”
“We should show a little respect, that’s all,” he grumbled.
Sudden Encephalitic Epileptic Lethargica Syndrome, or SEELS, was the more formal, if overly broad, term popularly used by scientists to describe the mystery disease. Other than naming it, scientists knew very little about it. Some said it reminded them of Minor’s Disease, with its sudden onset of pain and paralysis caused by bleeding into the spinal cord. Some wanted to explore exploding head syndrome, others frontal lobe epilepsy, others maladies related to the functioning of the inner ear. A group of scientists wrote a letter to the President demanding widespread sampling of air, soil, water and people for novel nanotechnology agents, warning that the worst may be yet to come.
Equally puzzling was the ongoing exotic symptoms exhibited by some of the victims of the new disease. Echolalia, for example, the automatic repetition of somebody else’s sounds. Echopraxia, the repetition of other people’s movements. And, in some cases, “waxy flexibility,” the victim’s limbs staying in whatever position they were last left, as if made of wax. Nobody could explain why some people had these symptoms and others did not, just as they could not explain how the disease chose its victims, nor how it spread so quickly around the globe in a single day. There were very few real facts, only hundreds of theories that tried to force these facts to make sense.
“Look, Ethan. They’ll reopen the schools soon. In the meantime, why not go to the school and see if you can volunteer at the clinic? A lot of people need care around the clock.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“It might do you some good,” she said tartly, cutting him down with a single a glance at his tangled, curly red hair and stubble. “Get out in the sunshine a bit. It’s time, Ethan.”
“All right, I probably will,” he lied. He had no intention of leaving the house. “Leave Mary here, then. Last night, when I was up watching some TV, there was some kind of rioting going on all over the west coast. I’d like to keep her close to home.”
“We live in Pennsylvania. And Mary misses her friends at daycare. They’re holding a special candlelight vigil today for the SEELS.”
“No talking!” said Mary, upset that her parents were talking to each other and not to her. “My talking!”
Carol got down on one knee to talk things out with their two-year-old, asserting their adult right to have a conversation, but the fact was the conversation was over.
Ethan made a cup of coffee, kissed them goodbye, and went back to bed.
He woke up, feeling uneasy, to the sound of sirens in the distance. Sitting up, he yawned and pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Sunlight shined into the second floor bedroom picture window, which offered a spectacular view of downtown that had cost them an extra twenty thousand dollars on the house list price. Ethan and Carol moved to the city from Philadelphia during the previous summer, and she insisted on having a view. It was early afternoon. He needed another cup of coffee. Then he glanced out the window and saw plumes of smoke rising up from downtown, over which helicopters swarmed. There were a lot of sirens.
“Goddammit, I knew something bad was happening,” he said, searching frantically for the TV remote before finally finding it under the bed. He clicked the television on and pulled on his glasses, blinking.
Riots spreading throughout the country, across the world in fact, focused on the hospitals and the clinics, following the same path as the screamer virus. Panicked mobs firebombing the clinics. Families of victims arming themselves and taking up positions outside the clinics. And the screamers, who had lain in a catatonic state for three days, were waking up and apparently committing acts of violence.
“Holy crap,” Ethan said, his heart racing.
He dialed his wife, but all circuits were busy. Should he drive to the daycare and get Mary? Then drive to the bank and get Carol? What if she were already driving here? What if she were trying to call him right now? He hung up the phone and paced, racked by indecision.
He needed a moment to think. He tore off his sweatpants and put on a pair of jeans and socks. He went downstairs, turned on the TV in the living room and made himself coffee, which he drank scalding. Some anchor on the TV was sobbing through evacuation instructions.
“Nobody knows anything!” he shouted at his empty house.
He made another coffee and drank it in front of the TV, hitting redial on his phone repeatedly and continually getting an all-circuits-busy signal. Then the news cut to video recorded by a helicopter accompanied by the breathless monologue of a reporter describing the scene.
A group of people surrounded a family of four in a tightening circle in the middle of a busy downtown intersection, blocking their escape. The man stepped in front of his wife and kids. The other people rushed in. The man punched one and then they beat him and his family to the ground and kicked them for a while and tore the children limb from limb, stunning the reporter into shocked silence. The screamers began to eat their remains while the man and the wife lay on the ground twitching.