Chosen by Christine Pope (free children's ebooks pdf txt) 📕

It had to be a hallucination, some strange coping mechanism my brain had cooked up, but still I found myself replying out loud.

“Does that mean I’m sick and will soon be dead along with everyone else?”

No. That is not your fate.

“What is my fate?”

Silence. Apparently my subconscious or whatever it was that had created the soft, reassuring baritone didn’t quite have the balls to tell me what my future held. Not that you needed to be a fortune-teller for that. Raging fever, and a pile of dust somewhere. Should I go out on the family room couch, or hike my way back up to my apartment when the time came? That seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort. After all, no one was using the spare bedroom.

I went into the bathroom to get a drink of water and saw the big bottle of ibuprofen sitting on the counter, the cap still off, as if my father hadn’t possessed the strength or will to put it back on again. Fingers shaking, I picked it up and twisted it onto the bottle, then put the ibuprofen back in the medicine cabinet. I didn’t want to leave a messy house behind.

Messy for whom, I didn’t know. From what my father had said, it didn’t sound as if anyone was getting out of this alive.

The thermometer was lying on the top rack in the medicine cabinet. I already knew I wasn’t sick, but I needed the external reminder. I took it out, opened the bottle of rubbing alcohol, and wiped down one end of the thermometer. Then I stuck it in my mouth and waited.

98.1. Up a little from the last time, but still below normal.

I rinsed it off and put it away. Then, moving so slowly I felt as if I were dragging my feet through mud, I went back to my parents’ bedroom, half expecting to see a pile of dust there. To my surprise, my father’s eyes opened when I came into the room. They were bright with fever and had those telltale dark circles beneath them, but they seemed lucid enough. Maybe he wasn’t as far gone as he had thought.

“Dad, I could try some ice — ”

A very small shake of his head. “No. Once you have it, you’re done.” His eyes shut, and I could see how his big frame was wracked with shivers, even though he’d pulled the blanket up to his chin. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” I repeated, wondering what he had to be sorry for. “None of this is your fault.”

“No — not that.” He shifted under the covers, then opened his eyes again. “Sorry that we’ll all be gone, and you’ll still be here.”

Something in his words chilled me. In that moment, I could see how dying along with everyone else might be preferable to being left in a world with no one to talk to, no one to even know I’d somehow managed to survive. Voice brittle, I replied, “Oh, I’m sure I’m not long for this world, either.”

“Fever?”

“No.”

He closed his eyes. It seemed as if he didn’t have the strength to keep them open and focused on me for more than a few seconds at a time. “You’re immune, Jess. Don’t know how…or why….”

That is not your fate. Despite the stuffiness of the room, I shivered as I thought of those words, spoken gently by someone who wasn’t there.

“Write down what’s happened. Maybe…there’ll be someone left to tell.”

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “I will.”

“Might as well put that English degree to some use.”

Oh, Dad. Even at the end, he had to make a joke. “All the commas will be in the right place. I promise.”

No reply. He could have simply fallen asleep, but I didn’t think so. Unlike my mother and Devin, he’d pushed all the way to the end, burned the candle until no more wick was left.

Somehow I put one foot in front of the other, walking slowly until I reached his side of the bed. A finger against his throat, telling me that he had gone, had left this world and was with Mom and Devin. I had to believe that. I’d break apart otherwise.

Since his eyes were closed, I didn’t bother to pull the sheet up over his face. Soon it wouldn’t matter anyway. He’d be a pile of dust, as no doubt my brother was by now as well.

I didn’t recall going downstairs, but the next thing I did remember, I was standing in the kitchen, staring down at my father’s half-drunk glass of Scotch. The ice had mostly melted, shifting the color to a pale gold. Without thinking, I lifted the glass and brought it to my lips, poured the liquid within down my throat. It burned, but not as much as I had thought it would.

What did it matter that my father had drunk from that same glass? According to him, I was immune. The thing that had killed him couldn’t touch me.

At last I could feel tears pricking at my eyes, stinging like acid, but I knew I couldn’t let them fall. If I did, I knew they would never stop. What was that old song, about some girl’s tears drowning the world? That would be me, if I wept now. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe a river, an ocean of tears, would wash away all this death, all the dust of people’s lives left behind.

Maybe. In the meantime, I had something I needed to do.

My parents had always loved the big oak tree in the backyard. In the summer, they hung a hammock there, and had a pair of Adirondack chairs they would drag out underneath it so they could sit in the shade and drink iced tea and plan the yearly family vacation, or maybe just a long weekend, so we could do something fun like go hiking up around Angel Fire or visit the museums in Santa Fe, or take the long trip down to Carlsbad Caverns.

All those things we’d done together as a family. Well, I’d make sure my family was together in the end, even if I couldn’t be with them. It was the only way I could think of to say goodbye.

My father kept all the gardening tools in a shed next to the garage, since the garage itself was full of camping equipment and tools and the usual crap any family of four tends to accumulate over the years. I went to the shed and got out the shovel, then headed back to the oak tree, staking out the spot where those Adirondack chairs usually sat.

It wouldn’t have to be a very deep hole. After all, I was only burying dust, not bodies. The ground was not as hard as I’d feared, mostly because my father had given the old oak one of its bimonthly soakings with the hose only this past weekend. I dug and dug, dirt flying out around me, only stopping when it looked like I was about to hit a big tree root. The hole was far larger than it needed to be, but better that than the opposite.

I leaned the shovel against the shed, then went into the kitchen to wash my hands. After that, I got a clean glass from the cupboard and filled it with water, then drank slowly, deliberately. I knew what was waiting for me upstairs.

There was enough room left in my mother’s Waterford vase for the dust my father left behind, so I poured it in on top of my mother’s remains. Going back to Devin’s room seemed far more difficult, for some reason; maybe it was that I hadn’t really been able to say goodbye to him. At least my father and I had shared those last few words.

The sight of the dust didn’t shock me anymore, but it was still awful enough to know that my brother had been lying in the same spot only an hour earlier. His MVP trophy from the previous football season seemed about the right size, so I did the same thing I had with my parents’ remains, using the bedclothes as a funnel to pour the dust into the receptacle I’d selected. That dust was a dark, cloudy gray, fine as silt, and seemed oddly liquid as I tipped it into the trophy.

I took Devin downstairs first, carefully setting the trophy down on the breakfast bar before returning to the second story to retrieve the Waterford vase. They went into the ground in reverse order, my parents’ dust poured into the hole first, followed by Devin’s. Grimly, I retrieved the shovel and began piling the dirt back on top of the dust, holding my breath in case any should plume up during the process. At last, though, the hole was more or less filled. I dragged the shovel back and forth, smoothing the surface, attempting to make it as level as possible.

Now was the time to say a few words, but nothing seemed to come to mind. I couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer, or more than the first few words of the Twenty-third Psalm.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” I began, then shook my head. What came next? The lines were all jumbled together in my head, nonsense syllables that sounded like something straight out of “Jabberwocky.” And what did it matter, anyway? We weren’t a religious family; we went to Christmas Eve services some years and some years not, maybe Easter. I’d gone to Sunday school when I was really little, but my parents hadn’t even bothered with that when Devin came along.

For the longest time I stood there under the oak, the sun disappearing altogether, deep dusk falling upon the yard. Then I moved, and the motion-sensor light mounted to the side of the garage flashed on.

“I love you all,” I said finally, then set the Waterford vase and the football trophy on top of their grave.

After that, I went back inside and shut the door behind me. It seemed to echo in the unnatural stillness of the house, and I realized it was hardly ever this quiet — someone always had the TV on in the background, or there was music playing, or somebody talking