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“You’re not sick, either,” I pointed out, and he gave a grim nod.
“I keep expecting to be, but….” Deliberately, he picked up his glass and drained the water. “I don’t know. It’s possible we could have a hereditary immunity. I just don’t know.” His fingers tightened on the glass, and for a second I thought he was going to pick it up and hurl it at the wall, do something to express the frustrated anger I saw in his eyes. Instead, he let go of it and pushed it away. “The problem is, I don’t know anything.”
Neither did I, except that I didn’t feel sick, and my father didn’t appear to have any symptoms, either. Maybe there really was something to that notion of hereditary immunity. In looks and build, I favored my mother, with my almost-black hair and dark eyes, traits she claimed came from a great-great-grandmother who was full-blood Ute, while Devin and my father were more alike, hair still dark but not as inky as mine, their eyes a lighter, warmer brown. So why my father and I were the ones with no symptoms, I couldn’t begin to guess. Obviously, appearance didn’t have much to do with this particular quirk of heredity.
“I don’t know anything, either,” I said. “But I guess I’ll start with checking on Devin.”
“And I’ll look in on your mother.” My father got up from his stool, and I followed suit.
Once I was upstairs, I could tell there hadn’t been any real change with my brother. He didn’t even seem to have moved, but still lay there with one arm flopped over the side of his bed, eyes tightly shut. In fact, he was so still that I went over and laid two fingers against his throat, worried that I wouldn’t feel a pulse. It was there, but thready and fast, which couldn’t be a good sign. His hair, cropped short for football season, was damp with sweat.
Something about that thought, the realization that he should be off at football practice right now instead of lying here, fighting a disease so mysterious and strange that it didn’t even have a formal name, made the anger rise up in me again. This shouldn’t be happening. He should be with his teammates, getting sweaty because his coach had made him do a hundred push-ups for being a smart-ass yet again. And an hour from now, we should all be sitting down at the dinner table together, something families hardly ever did anymore, but which my mother insisted on. I’d been skipping those meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays, since I had to teach a six o’clock class, but I tried to make it when I could.
None of that was happening, though. And it wasn’t happening for Devin’s girlfriend Lori, or my own friends Elena and Tori and Brittany, or — or anyone. All across the city…the country…the world…people were suffering and dying, and no one could stop it.
That realization made the enormity of the whole situation come crashing down on me. I let out a choked little sob and fled my brother’s room, running down the stairs to the family room so I could turn on the TV, could reassure myself with the sound of someone else’s voice, even if the newscasters were following the commands of people who might already be dead. I had to know a world still existed out there beyond my house, even if it was a world swiftly falling apart.
But when I picked up the remote and turned on the television, nothing came on to reassure me. Some stations blank, others showing a “please stand by” message, others with a test pattern of colored bars. My heart rate sped up as I moved from channel to channel, thinking that there had to be at least one still broadcasting, one that hadn’t been abandoned.
AMC seemed to be showing a rerun of The Walking Dead, which had to be someone’s idea of a sick joke, as I didn’t think that show ever ran before nine o’clock at night due to its content. And that wasn’t even the worst. Farther up the band, on a channel I didn’t recognize, the screen was black, with words in stark white emblazoned across it:
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood….
I wasn’t much of a Bible reader, but even I recognized the quote from Revelations.
Making a disgusted sound, I clicked off the TV, then turned when I heard my father come to the door and lean against the frame, his shoulders slumped.
“It is the end of the world,” he said softly.
That couldn’t be my father — my hard-nosed, practical father, the one who made sure I knew how to shoot, how to catch a fish and clean it, how to change the oil in my car and swap out a flat tire. Nothing ever fazed him. But now some underlying steel seemed to have given way, his firm jaw somehow loose, his eyes blurred with sorrow.
“Dad?” I said uncertainly.
“She’s gone,” he told me, voice flat. “While we were down in the kitchen.”
The words didn’t seem to make any sense. Or rather, my mind refused to make sense of them, because if I understood those words, I’d know in that moment my mother was dead, and I just couldn’t face that. Not yet.
For the longest moment, I didn’t say anything, only stared up at him as I turned the remote I held over and over in my hand, its familiar rectangular shape suddenly alien, cold and hard. Not wanting to hold it any longer, I set it down on the coffee table.
“No,” I said at last.
“Yes,” he said softly. “It doesn’t look like she suffered. At least, not like some that I’ve seen. You’d almost think she was asleep.”
“Maybe she is asleep,” I protested. “Maybe you just thought — just thought she was — ” I couldn’t say the word. Not in connection with my mother. If I said it, then it would be true, and I couldn’t bear that.
He didn’t bother to contradict me, only watched me. Something of the no-nonsense father I was used to was clear in those eyes. They said, I don’t want to believe it, either. But that doesn’t make it less true.
That hard knot was back in my throat. My eyes burned. For some reason, though, the tears wouldn’t fall. They just remained where they were, burning like acid.
Finally, I asked, “What should we do? Should we — ” I couldn’t even finish the question. This would have been bad enough under normal circumstances, but at least then there was a routine to follow. You called the doctor. The doctor called the ambulance, and then eventually someone got in touch with the funeral home. That was how it worked when Grandmother Ivy — my mom’s mother — had passed.
Now, though…now you couldn’t even get a call through. And if by some miracle you did, it wouldn’t matter, because there wouldn’t be anyone on the other end to answer it.
My father wouldn’t meet my eyes. “We don’t need to do anything,” he said, that scary monotone back in his voice. “It’ll take care of itself.”
And something in the way he said those words made me too frightened to ask what in the world he meant.
He went into the kitchen after that. I didn’t follow, but instead just stood there in the family room, my entire body feeling as if it had been encased in ice. One thought kept hammering away in my head, over and over again.
She’s dead. She’s dead. Your mother is dead.
I wished I could cry.
From the kitchen, I heard the clunk of ice dropping from the dispenser, the sound of liquid pouring, although not from the refrigerator door. I had a sinking feeling I knew exactly what it was.
My father was not, unlike a lot of cops, a heavy drinker. He and my mother would have a glass of wine with dinner sometimes, and I’d seen him drink champagne at weddings and have a beer after a morning of washing both his and Mom’s cars, but that was about it. But there was a bottle of Scotch he kept high up on a shelf, a bottle that rarely made an appearance. One time when his partner Josh was shot in the leg while breaking up a domestic dispute. Or the time my mother found a lump in her breast and had to go in for a biopsy.
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