Cascade by Tarr James

Author:Tarr, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Why do you sound so weird?” his daughter asked him.

“Maybe I’m only an alien pretending to be your dad,” he said.

“Dad-dy,” she said, with fake exasperation.

“I’ve got you on speaker phone,” he told her. “I’m doing something right now.” The something was icing his arm. Or, technically, peaing it. He had it laid across the kitchen table, several bags of frozen peas across it. And it wasn’t just his arm, throbbing after a day of working a baton. What he wanted to do was fill the bathtub with ice and sink his aching body into that, but he didn’t have that much ice. Or the energy to go out and buy some. After another fifteen-hour shift fighting crazies he was spent. And there was no end in sight, he only saw it getting worse, not better. At least, for a while. How long did it take for a whole city to get infected, and then get through it? Another week? Two? He wasn’t sure the city would survive that long, things seemed to be getting worse by the hour. “How are you doing?”

“Okay, I guess,” she said, added, “wearing masks is weird, you can smell your bad breath,” then without a pause dove into a detailed story about a dancing squirrel on the school playground, which then ran into a tale about a girl who’d gotten her hair somehow caught in a desk.

After ten minutes she finally ran out of steam, and he heard her mother in the background. “Time to get ready for bed, young lady. Go brush your teeth while I talk to your father.”

“Okay. Bye Daddy. Good night. I love you!”

“Love you too, Bumper.”

He heard his wife take the phone, and wait, until the sounds of his daughter faded. “Things as bad as they’re saying on the news?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ve been too busy to turn on the TV. But, probably.” He shifted his body, and stifled a groan.

“Oh, I know that sound,” his wife said knowingly. “What did you do, pull your back?”

He laughed tiredly. “My arm. I’ve honest-to-God been fighting people all day. They’ve got squads of us running around doing nothing but dealing with the…”

“The zombies?”

He sighed. “Yeah. I hate to call them that, they’re people, but…they’re not. There’s nobody home, you look in their eyes. They’re gone. They just want to hit and bite.”

“And there are enough of them they’ve got squads detailed just for that?” The worry in her voice was palpable.

“Yep. And dealing with looting in some of the retail areas. Which means we’re not answering a lot of calls. And the citizens know it. So they’re shooting each other up like it’s a long holiday weekend.” He’d heard five hundred dead in the city in the last three days. He could believe it, after everything he’d seen, although he didn’t want to. “Fire department’s actually fighting fires, instead of paramedic work, as the assholes seem to like setting stores on fire after they loot them.

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