Redaction: Extinction Level Event (Part I) (2 page)

Her attention drifted over the restaurant. A cashier stood behind the counter, waiting but not pushing—no doubt used to the hesitation, the fear of company. How many had walked in, only to walk out again? Not many, she’d bet. Only two booths remained empty of talking people spewing germs with every word, eager to connect with other human beings face-to-face.

The way nature had intended.

The way the Rattling Death had spread so effectively.

Rocking on her heels, Sunnie traced the large, white letters of last year’s scheduled release date. “This was Armand Strong’s last film.”

Armand Strong, the dark brooding hunk that’d set women’s hearts aflutter only to die—the first A-list Hollywood casualty—of the influenza. The first, but not the last. At least he’d be remembered as the James Dean of the new millennia. The mop hit the tile with a slurpy thump.

Mavis set her hand on Sunnie’s shoulder and gently squeezed it through the warm fleece jacket. “What are you in the mood for?”

“I don’t know...” After one last glance at the poster, Sunnie turned to the digital menu.

Not that the vast majority of Americans didn’t know the items by heart, but the outing was a treat to be savored, not rushed. No matter Mavis’s wishes, it was time to be in the company of mankind again. She eyed the ruby-red tomatoes, spring-green lettuce, golden fried chicken and perfectly browned burgers in the lush pictures. Saliva pooled in her mouth. Mmm. Fresh meat.

Her attention flickered to the first image and stuck like a gold-medal gymnast on landing. “I know what I’m having.”

“Me too!” Sunnie shashayed to the counter.

Mavis scuttled behind her, stomach growling as a buxom cook shook the excess oil from the fries before dumping the basket’s contents onto the silver bin underneath the heat lamps.

A tremor traveled up the cashier’s lanky frame before he smiled. “Welcome to Burgers in a Basket. What can I get for you today?”

“I’ll have a number ten with no Mayo, large-sized drink and fries.” Sunnie stroked the ponytail hanging over her shoulder. “And give me a sundae with strawberry topping and nuts.”

Holding his bottom lip between his teeth, the cashier punched the appropriate buttons. Saliva glistened on the pink skin in the fluorescent light when he looked up. “Anything else?”

Flinging her ponytail behind her back, Sunnie shook her head and stepped to the side. “Nope. Just don’t forget the nuts.”

Shuffling forward, Mavis eyed the spit on his lip. How many bugs clung to his flesh, waiting to launch at her the moment he spoke? She dragged her attention from his mouth and focused on his eyes. Nice eyes—blue like a clean, mountain lake.

They blinked at her now. His shoulders squared as time ticked by.

She’d been staring too long. Her palm sweated against the bottle of hand sanitizer. Mavis mentally shook herself, removed her hands from her pockets and steadied one on the strap of her leather purse. “I’ll have a number one, large-sized fries and a chocolate shake, with an extra cup for water.”

The cashier’s attention dropped to the register as he poked the buttons. When his fingers stopped, he read back the order. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“No, I—”

An elderly team member creaked by with a toy clasped between her gnarled fingers. Plastic crinkled around the plush crocodile in the bag, while powdered desiccant rolled along the bottom crease.

Mavis glanced at her niece before jerking her head toward the blue bin holding a handful of toys. “Do you want Snapper, a friend of Hatshepsut?”

Sunnie rolled her eyes as if searching the inside of her skull for why anyone over twenty was so lame. “No, those are kids’ toys.” A second later, she faced front and her eyes narrowed on the cardboard sign at the end of the counter. “I’ll take a cup though.”

“Because cups with cartoon characters are for adults.” Swallowing a chuckle, Mavis cleared her throat. “We’ll have two cups, please.”

The cashier nodded, peeked under his lashes at Sunnie, and then pressed a key twice. “That’ll be thirty dollars and sixteen cents.”

Mavis swallowed hard. Lord, love a duck! That’s more than twice what she’d have paid, before the Rattling Death.

Sunnie bumped her arm, before slapping money on the stainless steel counter. “I have a ten.”

“Don’t be silly!” Heat rippled over Mavis, settling in her face. Her fingers slipped off her purse’s zipper twice, before she managed to grasp the tab. The metal parted with a low growl. “This is my treat. It’s your birthday remember?”

The clerk’s attention bounced from her to Sunnie then back again. “Burgers in a Basket accepts credit and debit cards.”

“How nice for you.” The little twerp! Embarrassment singed Mavis’s ears. She unsnapped her wallet’s front compartment. The edges of neatly folded bills fanned against the black satin interior.

“Never?” Sunnie drummed her fingers on her ten-dollar bill. “Not even when the Redaction was at its height?”

Mavis winced at the internet term for the Rattling Death. God, how callous the cyber world could be. Pretending the largest influenza pandemic in human history was nothing more than the government eliminating swaths of the population with a black pen.

“Not even then.” The clerk dipped under the counter for a tray. Water sprinkled the metal surface when he set it down.

At least, they were taking their cleaning seriously. Mavis snapped the compartment shut before moving on to the one on the back of her wallet. “Credit cards hold less germs than paper or coins, and the clerks get the bonus of not having to touch either—reducing the spread of infection.”

She had written that memo the first official week of the pandemic. Greed had stopped many businesses from heeding it. They’d wanted greenbacks, gold and silver and it had showed in the soaring body count.

“Your company must care about its employees.” Or money. Following the rules meant the burger joint’s drive-thru remained open. After unsnapping the right compartment, she sifted through business cards until she came upon a gift card for the restaurant. She presented the red and green plastic with a flourish before swiping it through the reader.

“Yes, ma’am.” The clerk ducked his head, but not before she saw the whites of his eyes flash.

Teenagers! Mavis sighed and filed the card back in her wallet. Just once, she’d like their expression to freeze in a mask of insolence, forcing them to go through life staring at the tops of their skulls.

The Point of Service machine beeped its approval just as a team member bustled over with two red plastic baskets. Shoestring fries poked through the open weave, while a burger perched on top of the mound of golden slivers of potatoes.

The door opened, adding to the buzz of voices inside. Cold crept along the floor to envelop her ankles.

“I’ll get my drink and find us a table.” Sunnie grabbed her upside-down cup off the tray and skipped over to the soda fountain.

While the cashier greeted the newcomers, the machine in front of the wrinkled team member whirred with the contents of her shake. Mavis sidled away from the family of four. Had they survived intact?

As if feeling her gaze, the mother glanced in Mavis’s direction. Dull gray eyes swept over her to settle on the stack of wooden highchairs. She gripped her school-age daughter’s jacket. White tipped her knuckles. Muscle roped her neck when she swallowed. For a moment, she squeezed her eyes shut. The motion highlighted the fatigue bruising the delicate skin under her sockets.

Mavis’s stomach cramped. Guess it was too much to ask for one family to have escaped the pestilence unscathed. Nodding to the old woman who placed the chocolate shake on the tray, Mavis grabbed the food and turned around. Where was her niece? Faces turned in her direction, but not the one she wanted, no needed, to see. Her heart rate kicked up tempo.

“Aunt Mavis?”

Her ears pricked at the sound of her name. There—behind the glass divider—Sunnie waved her pale arm above her head.

With a roll of her shoulders, Mavis released the tightness that stretched across her back. It had been silly to think the girl would get sick and die in minutes. Silly. Her stomach roiled as she waded into the seating area. Dodging around a man unstrapping a toddler from a high-chair, she passed a couple absently stuffing fries in their mouths. While their fingers fumbled on the tray for more, their attention jerked from child-to-child-to-child. Eyes never resting on one face too long, never ceasing, never finding the one they desperately wanted to see.

Never.

Their raw grief zinged through her like she’d touched a live wire. Muscle turned to rubber and her knees shook. Loose fries tumbled across the paper covering the tray.

No, not never.

Ghosts returned in a familiar smell, a burst of laughter, and the unguarded moments of sleep.

Metal squeaked before a yellow bucket bumped against a bench, jerking her away from her thoughts. With her back toward Mavis, the employee swished her mop from side-to-side.

“Excuse me.” Mavis stepped over the darting mop, and her loafers squeaked on the wet tile. Reaching the table, she plunked down the tray and collapsed on the burnt-orange bench. The vinyl sighed as it adjusted to her weight. Snatching up a napkin, she swept the white granules strewn across the table into a neat pile and caught them in another napkin, folded the bundle and chucked it in the trash can near their booth. People needed to be more careful with their spilled salt.

Sunnie’s lips quirked. “What? No bleach wipes or hand sanitizer?”

Clearing her throat, Mavis dusted her hands on her pants. She loved her niece, but God, kids could be such a pain in the ass. “No. With things back to normal, it’s time to let our immune system meet a few harmless bugs.”

She brushed her hand over the tabletop. Good. Nothing sticky. She drew the line at sticky. There was a reason icky rhymed with sticky.

“The bug that caused the Redaction wasn’t harmless.” Sunnie set her packet of hand wipes on the table, tugged one white cloth out, and then ran the damp towelette over her fingers.

Mavis wrinkled her nose at the alcohol smell. How long before she could have a drink without thinking about the Rattling Death? “That was an aberration. Most bugs are harmless, especially the ones you’ve just killed off with that wipe.”

“Geez.” Sunnie dropped the towelette. “Wash your hands, don’t wash them. Do this, don’t do that.”

Proper washing involved soap and hot water, not a wipe. Not that she’d tell her niece. Obviously, this outing was stressful for her, too; she just hid it better. Mavis ripped open a packet of ketchup and squirted the red contents onto the paper tray liner.

“Can you believe that?” Sunnie snatched two fries from the tray and dunked them in Mavis’s pile of ketchup. Her head bobbed toward the flat-screen TV in the corner above the booth behind them.

Mavis stabbed her straw into her milkshake. She never listened to the news anymore. It was too depressing. “Let me guess, another suicide-by-cop.”

So many couldn’t face the empty silence, yet lacked the will to end their own lives—especially when the police could do it for them at the price of waving around an empty gun.

Cheeks bulging with fries, Sunnie shook her head.

“Suicide-by-bridge? Building?” Using her teeth, Mavis ripped more ketchup packets open. Boy did that sound cold. True, but cold. Suicides hit the ten-percent mark last week. The head-shrinkers predicted the number might rise to twenty-five percent by the end of the year.

Almost as deadly as the flu.

“No.” Sunnie raised her soda toward the screen.

Mavis pushed a pickle further under her bun. “What then?”

“North Korea.” Sunny tucked another helping of fries inside her mouth. “They’re threatening military action, saying the epidemic was a terrorist attack by the US.”

Sweet Jesus! Why did fools have to think everything was a terrorist attack? Couldn’t Mother Earth just be pissed off at the polluters clinging to her skin? “How in the world do they plan to fight with half their soldiers dead?”

Sunnie’s brow furrowed. “Half? I thought the Redaction only had a thirty-five percent fatality rate.”

Doubts bubbled through Mavis’s chest and emerged as humorless chuckles.

“That’s the official body count.” But the classified satellite photos told a far different story. Asia was on fire, and it showed in the smoke permeating the air from Alaska to Florida and the haze swallowing the Phoenix skyline. “The Dear Leader underreports bad news.”

Or maybe his thugs had burned so many citizens alive in the cities, they didn’t count them as Influenza casualties. But still... to blame someone else for a world-wide pandemic was new level of insanity for Pyongyang. Swiveling on the bench seat, Mavis drew the straw to her mouth and pulled hard on her shake. Although the TV’s volume remained low, she read the newscaster’s lips. The sweet, cold creamy taste turned to ash on her tongue.

“Not just military action. If the US doesn’t give into their reparation demands, there’ll be war.”

Chapter Two

The cot groaned as David Dawson hunched over the acoustic guitar in his lap. His thumb plucked at the string while he adjusted the silver peg heads. For a moment, the repeated notes mingled with the snores of his two sleeping barrack mates before escaping out the tent’s open window and lost themselves in the snap of an unsecured flap.

David strummed his guitar softly before using his nails to pick out the notes of a lullaby. The music swelled against the canvas of the Tent Expandable Modular PERsonnel barracks. Closing his eyes, he blocked out all thoughts of the TEMPER quarters and lost himself in the melody.

No more empty spaces in place of unnecessary cots. No more garbage bags for over-ripe corpses. No more refrigerated trucks needing rotting bodies to be unloaded and dumped into dirt pits—mass graves of the forgotten.

Forgotten.

His fingers stumbled over G. Before the discordant note faded, he opened his eyes. Hell, he had no one to remember him even before the Redaction took half his unit. More than half. Sixty-three percent to be exact. He had to wear two copper bracelets to have enough room to etch every name.