Dead World | Novel | Dead Zero Read online

  The new woman growled. Jaron eyed one, then the other.

  “Oh, good,” he said, not feeling good at all. “I guess what I was saying is for all of you. The thing is, Rip Daddy affects the brain.” He tapped his head, in case they didn’t know what a brain was. Then he remembered that maybe they didn’t; nobody had ever heard the Schneiders speak anything other than German, and it was possible they didn’t understand anything in English.

  “If it’s affecting your brain,” he said, forgetting all about the differences between English and German, “you can’t think right. You do things like … well … like go out in your nightgown without slippers. You might not think to get tested because you’re just not … not thinking right, you know?”

  They started to walk slowly toward him, closing in from both sides.

  “I’ll…” He searched for something to do or say — something not cowardly or stupid. He could be noble. No matter what May said. “I’ll call someone for you. Sound good?”

  Now they both groaned, still advancing.

  He saw mouths open. Their teeth were covered with something black, like tar.

  “Maybe I could drive you to urgent care.” This, he didn’t remotely mean. If he was driving these two spooks anywhere, they’d be in a locked trailer far behind his vehicle. “What do you say? Feel better in the morning?”

  Another lie, of course. Rip Daddy didn’t have a cure and was fatal within days.

  This is your brain; this is your brain on Rip Daddy; this is your brain after it’s been sugared and whipped into hard peaks of meringue.

  He’d be taking them to medical custody where the two of them could die, but at least they wouldn’t be prowling the shadows like alley cats.

  They were right on him now. Six feet away at most. Even knowing he couldn’t catch it, Jaron felt a paranoid urge to keep away. He should let it all go. Call the police if he had to instead of yelling for help; let May come out here to nursemaid them if she found that weak-willed.

  He had his hand on the gate before he knew it, preparing to step through and leave them out here to spit and hiss. He hoped they wouldn’t die behind his house. Rumor said brain leaked through Rip Daddy ears when it was over, and the resulting goo was impossible to scrub from wood or concrete.

  “Okay. Have a nice evening, the—”

  He was staring at the third sister, this one inside his yard on the other side of the fence. Instead of turning to walk inside, he turned right into her face.

  There was a knife buried to its hilt in her throat. Her front was an apron of dried blood. Jaron didn’t know much about anatomy, but he did know that the blade looked to be three inches wide at its broadest point, and its sideways position pretty much had to have severed her esophagus, windpipe, and probably one or both of the big arteries.

  But still, the woman was upright. She was breathing, but it was a strange kind of breath. Passive more than active, the way you breathe for someone in CPR. A small flap beneath the knife blade opened and closed to reveal a pure black interior.

  “Jesus,” he said, fighting a panic-blinding surety that with that wound, she should be dead — she absolutely had to be dead. “You need to get to—!”

  Jaron never said the rest.

  Unlike the Schneider sisters, he found himself unable to breathe once his neck was ripped to jerky.

  Two

  Routine and Urgent

  Thom Shelton wouldn’t stop checking the news.

  That was his engineer’s nature. He wanted to codify, label, name, and ultimately understand everything there was to be understood. Carly kept telling him that not everything could be explained, but Thom always thought her words were more spiritual than practical. She thought that everything happened for a reason (it didn’t), that everyone had a purpose (they didn’t) and that somewhere deep down, fathers always loved their sons — which was relevant today more than most days, but no less bullshit.

  So when she chastised Thom by telling him that he’d never understand all that happened, it was an easy thing to brush away. Carly might as well be telling him that his aura’s colors were off, or that he shouldn’t conduct any banking while Mercury was still in retrograde.

  After saying it twice, however, she wrapped her smooth hands with their purple fingernails around his phone, delicately removed it from his grip, then dropped it into her purse.

  “Excuse me?” Thom asked.

  “Nobody knows, Thom. Get it? Nobody knows.”

  “Nobody’s trying very hard, then.”

  She looked for Brendan before speaking. He was fourteen and plenty capable of hearing his parents discuss an illness he was too immortal to ever get, but that right there was half the problem — and this, Thom understood far better than his wife. Carly was the go-with-the-flow, let’s-be-honest-instead-of-protecting-him-from-every-little-thing parent, and by default that turned Thom into the bad guy. He didn’t love that role, but the alternative was to give in and treat Brendan like the adult he hadn’t yet become.

  That’s what Thom’s father had done, but how had that turned out? Rick spent more time jumping from airplanes and wandering the earth even after Thom was born than he spent parenting, and whenever Thom had tried to confront him about it, Rick’s defense was, “You weren’t as fragile as you think you were.”

  These days Carly and Rick said the same sorts of things about Brendan, and it wasn’t true; Thom refused to let it be true. He didn’t want his son fragile, but he didn’t want him foolhardy like his grandfather, either. If Carly hadn’t looked to be sure Brendan wasn’t around before speaking now, Thom would have been. At least she was learning to respect his wishes that much.

  “Diseases come up and go away in nature,” Carly told Thom, quieter.

  They weren’t to the front desk of Shady Acres yet, and he needed to finish this conversation before they did. The clerks weren’t health workers, but they worked with all the eldercare folks here and would, in all likelihood, fancy themselves experts. Thom wanted to hear from realists, not experts.

  There was a disease out there and its reports were getting stranger all the time. It wasn’t that Thom wanted its threat eradicated so much as he wanted a reasonable answer already. Every time there was a new flu, the CDC knew exactly where it came from. Rip Daddy had the CDC scratching their heads, and instead it was the bio nerds at Hemisphere advancing most of the theories.

  How was Rip Daddy outsmarting the CDC? It wasn’t. Thom was sure there had to be more to the story.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I am.” Thom reached out, took back his phone.

  “Are you sure? Because if I had to guess, I’d say you’re just being a big old bitch.”

  “What?” Thom asked.

  “You heard me. I love you, Thomas, and I know you’re a strong-willed man with an amazing head on your shoulders.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I also know that when it comes to your father, all that intelligence flies right out the window. Instead, you become a whiny bitch. Remember Carl Treeger?”

  “Carly, I—”

  “Whenever you’re around Rick, you’re a bigger bitch than Carl Treeger.”

  “You know you’re a woman, right?”

  “Oh, this has nothing to do with gender. The kind of bitch you get around Rick, it’s like new words have to be made before we can properly define how bitchy you are. It’s unreal.”

  “Carly, this is—”

  She took his phone back, delicate but firm. “Then prove me wrong. You weren’t this interested in the news at home and you weren’t interested in the car. You only got obsessed with epidemiology once we got within sight of the front desk. Now. Look. You know he’s doing much better. The caretakers say he’s lucid way more often than not. Nobody wants to say that it’s working, but I’ll say it; I think it’s working. And I’d know, since I see your father way more often than you do. Now tell me. Is that what an intelligent, stand-up person should be able to say about
his father — that his spouse pays more attention than he does? Or is that what a bitch would say?”

  “Carly …”

  “Say my name all you want. But do it after you sign us in. You can talk on the way. Maybe see what Brendan thinks.”

  Low blow and checkmate. Thom was forcibly reminded that despite his many degrees and accolades, his half-hippie wife was far smarter than he was. He couldn’t obsess and fret in a group because if he did it around Brendan, the boy would become cavalier and start looking for loopholes to poke through his father’s outbreak rules … and if he did it around Rick, the old man would then humiliate Thom badly enough to send him on his way clucking back home with his tail tucked neatly between his legs.

  The only place to procrastinate and pout was right here and now, shy of the front desk with only Carly in earshot. Closing that door would leave Thom with no choice but to fall into line.

  “Fine,” he said.

  She handed him the phone and he put it into his pocket, making a mental note to codify the news stories later. It probably wouldn’t happen; Carly was annoyingly correct that he was only truly interested when it could keep him from having to visit his father. It was like what his mom, when she’d been alive, had called “bus-itis” — a sickness the kids woke up with, then recovered from the minute the school bus had passed them by.

  They went to the desk and Thom, to save his dignity, signed the three of them in to visit one Richard Shelton, Room 720. The girl behind the desk was wearing dinosaur scrubs and smiled at Carly. Do-gooder. Carly didn’t just visit her father-in-law more often than Thom; she also volunteered all over the community with many of the other seniors — mostly early-stage Alzheimer’s patients like Rick.

  Every once in a while, when Carly got righteous about it (in Thom’s opinion, anyway), he considered rebutting with some form of “It must be nice” or “Sure, it’s easy when.” But in truth it wasn’t easy for Carly to volunteer at Shady Acres. She fit a half hour of reading-to-the-elderly in during three lunch breaks per week, and her hospital was six traffic-packed miles away.

  Often, after a full day of anesthetizing patients followed by a delicious family dinner, Carly went back to volunteer in the evenings. Thom usually said he was too tired to join her and she pretended to accept his excuse as something close to valid. Once she was gone, he tried to forget that he worked behind a desk and she was on her feet most of the day. Stupid damn Woman of the Year.

  To Carly’s credit, she lorded none of this over Thom unless he forced her to, like he had out front. If he accepted a family visit to Rick once a month without complaining about it, he could go long stretches of time in which she let him pretend he was some sort of antiquated Man of the House when, in fact, he was nothing of the sort.

  It was a delicate mental balancing act, wherein Thom was both protector and antagonist. He was the one who swore he was doing nothing wrong but he was also his own accuser. Trying to hide from your own insults almost required a pair of separate personalities. Thom, who was of two minds about his father already, did his very best.

  They found Rick on the seventh floor polishing knives.

  “Christ, Dad,” said Thom, rushing in to take them. “Do they know you have these?”

  “They’re mine.” Rick wasn’t perturbed even though Thom had just taken his toys. His expression read as it always did. I’ll get my way in the end, and if you don’t believe it, then you can just try and stop me.

  “You’re not allowed to have weapons.”

  “They’re not weapons, Tommy. They’re knives.”

  “Knives are weapons.”

  And Brendan, taking two of the knives from a side table upon which Thom had sat them, said, “Cool! Where did you get these, Grandpa?”

  “Monster hunters,” Rick said.

  “Dad …”

  “Really, Grandpa.”

  “I’m serious! Did you watch An American Werewolf in London like I told you?”

  Brendan laughed. “What about The Shining?”

  “There’s no monsters in The Shining,” said Carly.

  “Oh. That’s where you’re wrong. ‘This inhuman place makes human monsters.’”

  “He’s too young for those movies,” Thom said. “Stop baiting him, Dad.”

  “He’s fourteen.”

  “Exactly: He’s fourteen!”

  “Only seems younger because you baby him like your mother babied you.”

  “OOOOKAY,” Carly said, cutting a diagonal swath through the room, between Thom on one side and Rick and Brendan on the other. It was just one word, but she’d honed it to a perfect edge as an all-purpose peace bludgeon. She’d taught herself to smile a little while saying it and to pitch her tone just so, thereby somehow conveying mild annoyance (That’s just about enough of that, you two, and I mean it!) and amusement (Oh, you silly boys and your ways.) in unison. It was neither too rough, which would have raised both men’s defenses, nor too amused, which would have encouraged Rick to keep going if only to irritate his buzz-kill son. “Let’s get you packed up to go.”

  “Where am I going?” Rick asked.

  “The mall, Dad. We talked about going to the mall, remember?”

  Rick’s mental state slid on a spectrum between “lucid, socially aggressive, prank-loving ex-Marine” and “paranoid, socially aggressive, mentally confused ex-Marine.” Somewhere in the middle, a sweet spot sometimes created “confused and slightly desperate old man,” but that one was rare and hadn’t shown his face since they’d started Rick on his so-far-so-good pharma trial.

  Worse, Rick was aware of them, even when the Alzheimer’s had its little flares. Normal Rick (the lucid one) hated the other versions of himself and seemed to have declared war on them all. Guessing his current state and getting it wrong was never a pleasant way to begin.

  As Thom realized he’d just done — quite by accident this time.

  “I know we talked about the mall, goddammit,” Rick snapped, his voice even but full of barbs. “I’m not feeble. But she said ‘pack.’ Do I need a winter coat and rations? Maybe some MREs?”

  “I just meant your wallet and coat.”

  “And your—” Thom began, but Carly held up a hand where Rick couldn’t see.

  “And here they are,” Carly said instead, going for the wallet on the table.

  Technically, yes, Rick required a few more items whenever he was leaving these days. He almost never needed his cane, but Thom always wanted to take it anyway — in case his father spontaneously injured himself like had happened only once four years ago. The cane folded small enough to fit in a bag, so Carly always took the bag along with a light sweater.

  With two bag-sized items already in the mix, Carly usually added a bottle of water (Rick complained whenever anyone charged for water) and a small bag of jerky. Rick wasn’t supposed to have jerky, but he said most normal snacks were for children or pussies. He wasn’t really supposed to eat jerky, but it was easier to just let him have it when so much else was out of routine.

  Someone arrived at the door, mid-sentence. A nurse, his head down over a clipboard. Only after reading a bit then finally looking up did he see Rick’s small room at capacity.

  “Morning, Mr. Shelton! Doc Gellert asked me to come by and ask when you wouldn’t mind me poking you again, just one vial this time, and I promise I’ll be … Oh, hello! Visitors, I see!”

  Carly said hello, then bustled the nurse out of the room. She was always pulling things like this. Privileges of being here so often, volunteering, getting to know the staff. Thom was torn. Everything Carly took off their collective plate was a relief, but he hated that he couldn’t handle any of them. A catch-22. In order to deal with his father better, he’d need to spend more time dealing with his father. The math was bizarre. Maybe it wasn’t kind, but he’d grown up thinking of nursing homes as set-it-and-forget-it.

  Carly returned alone.

  “What’d he want?” Rick asked.

  “Just some tests. They’ll handle it
when we get back.”

  “What tests? I just had all my tests.”

  “He says one of your proteins tested high.”

  “Well, in that case, I guess it’s time to end it.” Rick took one of the knives Thom had confiscated and, before Thom could stop him, put on a gory-hilarious show for his grandson: first faux-slitting his own throat, then faux-committing hari-kari by jamming the blade into his armpit and pretending to strike his gut.

  Brendan laughed, and Thom was again conflicted, back to wondering when he’d become so wishy-washy that he couldn’t decide whether he preferred Brendan happy here and respecting his elders (he liked Rick’s stories but usually hated these visits, said it smelled like stale bread and medicine) or if he should be annoyed that once again, Rick was undermining him with all these unacceptable behaviors: owning and using death knives, rolling around on the floor as his doctors had told him not to do, modeling violence for a kid Thom had tried to keep as much violence from as possible.

  Ultimately he didn’t need to decide, because Carly went on talking and Rick stopped clowning long enough to listen. As she spoke, Thom watched his father, seeing focus in the old man’s eyes. He really was improving. He owed Hemisphere a thank-you for that. If Rick got better and stayed better, maybe he could live on his own for another decade or two and make these visits unnecessary. He was only sixty-eight. His own father, well past ninety, was still alive, still tending a garden and chickens more or less on his own.

  “Gregor said it’s routine. He can do the test later.”

  But Thom didn’t like what he saw behind Carly’s smiling eyes. Rick and his daughter-in-law got along, but only Thom could read nuance in his wife like he was seeing now.

  While Rick gathered his things, Thom pulled her to one side.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “One of your dad’s tests came back abnormal,” she told him.