Free This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) by Robert Chazz Chute Page B

bedlam his classroom could descend to, but the quiet was more disturbing. He saw no one on the sidewalk in front of his house and traffic on his once busy suburban drive was rare.  
    The Greeks were wrong, Jaimie decided. It was the quiet that held evil. He couldn’t see them, but he suspected everyone was hiding in their homes, waiting to see what came next.“It’s like everyone’s holding their breath,” his father remarked at breakfast. Jaimie recognized the phrase as an idiom he’d heard before, but he still didn’t understand it. One could only hold his breath for so long and then, if the Sutr Virus’s greasy black wasps invaded your energy field, what could one do but breathe them in and feel the aura drain of light?
    Jaimie dismissed the thought and delved further into the big dictionary. He got stuck on some words. Many times he could puzzle out definitions but it wasn’t clear to him how they could be used in an actual sentence. He chased the trail of definitions, going from one word he didn’t understand to the next, skipping around the dictionary.  
    Happening on curious root words in his big dictionary, he switched to his little red book: The Guide to Latin Phrases . Latin appealed to Jaimie because the dead language’s phrases were still alive: veritas simplex oratio est . The language of truth is simple .  
    The entries were so descriptive, Latin explained things people wouldn’t think about otherwise, the opposite of opaque idioms. The little red book held instructions in thinking that altered the world and gave it clarity. When he held the book, his mind stood strong, without cacophony. His Latin phrase dictionary — each phrase a concept and a poem, too — showed him how other people thought, if they thought clearly.
    Sine loco et anno leapt off the page at Jaimie. Without place and date . Since everyone went into hiding, location and time didn’t matter anymore. It was one of the subtle things the plague had brought, slowing everything down, reducing each day to necessity. If death was existence without movement, living under the shadow of the plague was something like death. The disease brought the world’s clock to a halt. The quiet gave people time to think. They looked up from their work and paused to consider what they were if they weren’t their jobs. For many, the answer would be disturbing.
    Jaimie frequently returned to the word dirigo . It means I direct or I guide or I lead the way . The book told him it was the motto of Maine, the state where his grandfather, Papa Spence, lived on a farm. The intent of the Latin word was to explain that God was in charge of everything. However, the people of Maine generally assumed their motto meant they stood in control of their destiny and “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” If time and place no longer meant anything in the face of Sutr, perhaps the people of what used to be Maine had already let go of that conceit.
    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