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

and laid them across her forehead. Some of the moisture dripped on her gray silk blouse, leaving damp blotches. I hoped they wouldn’t leave stains.

Seriously, you’re worrying about a couple of stains at a time like this?

I supposed I was fixating on that, just because it was easier to worry about something like ruining my mother’s clothes rather than the big-picture stuff, like how none of the phones were working. Yes, I’d heard how that could happen after some kind of disaster, but Albuquerque wasn’t really prone to disasters, whether natural or man-made.

The back door slammed, and my mother started, then began twitching and shaking again. Damn. And I’d just gotten her to a place where she seemed to be more or less resting comfortably. But maybe that slamming door meant my father had come home.

I readjusted the damp towel on my mother’s forehead, then got up and went into the kitchen. Devin was getting a glass out of the cupboard as I entered. He looked fine — no flushed cheeks, no sheen of sweat — and in that moment I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hug him in relief or punch him in the arm for making us worry like that about him.

“Where the hell have you been?” I demanded.

“Lori’s,” he replied, going to the refrigerator and getting some ice and water out of the door.

“Well, you scared the crap out of Mom. She couldn’t get a hold of you — ”

He shrugged. “I sent a text. Maybe it didn’t go through. Anyway, they sent us home, and Lori couldn’t get in touch with either of her parents, so she was freaking out. So I stayed with her.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling some of my righteous indignation begin to seep away. Lori was an only child, and a little coddled, so I could see why she’d be more than ordinarily upset at not being able to contact her parents. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah, her mom finally got a text through and said she was on her way home, so I thought I’d better get over here.” His gaze sharpened on me, and I wondered what he saw. Lord knows, I was starting to feel kind of overloaded. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, but Mom isn’t,” I replied bluntly. Maybe too bluntly, because he almost dropped the glass he was holding.

“She’s — she’s not sick, is she?”

“Yes. She just got the fever about a half hour ago.”

Beneath his end-of-summer tan, my brother’s face drained of all color. “She can’t be sick!”

Right then he didn’t look like the big, broad-shouldered running back, but a scared kid. I wanted to go hug him, but lately he’d been scorning such sisterly displays of emotion, so I wasn’t sure how he would react. Instead, I kept my voice calm as I told him, “She had a high fever, but I got her to take some ibuprofen, and she’s resting now with some cold cloths on her head. So far, so good.”

That sounded very reasonable, very steady. Never mind that I didn’t really believe it. If this disease really was at all survivable, that information would’ve been all over the news by now. The complete radio silence on the actual facts of the disease told me that it was beyond dire…it was catastrophic.

My words didn’t seem to reassure Devin. He gave me a stricken look and then went into the family room, where he stopped a few feet away from the couch and stared down at our mother. She seemed to be sleeping, but something seemed off about her face, as if her cheeks and eye sockets had begun to look sunken, far too shadowed.

No, that couldn’t be right. It had to be a trick of the lighting in the room; I’d pulled the drapes almost closed so the afternoon light that was beginning to slant into the space wouldn’t disturb her. Just some sort of strange optical illusion.

Only I feared that wasn’t it at all.

Devin appeared to be of the same mind. He stood there, hands hanging helplessly at his sides, as he stared down at her. Finally, he whispered, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

In that moment, I was furious with him for giving voice to that thought, as if by saying it out loud he could somehow cause it to happen. “No, she’s not,” I shot back, my voice shaking.

“She is,” he insisted, and right then I was glad that she was more or less comatose. At least that way she couldn’t possibly hear what we were saying. “When I was over at Lori’s house, we were on the computer, trying to get more information. A lot of the sites we went to were down, but we found one with this guy on video saying that everyone who catches it dies, and that the government is shutting down anyone who tries to spread the truth.”

I recalled that one blonde newscaster, and the way her gaze kept flickering nervously to something — or someone — off-screen. FBI…or CIA…or NSA…agents, standing there and watching to make sure the reporters all said the same thing?

At any other time, that would have felt like rank paranoia. Now, though….

“That’s crazy,” I said, although I didn’t sound all that convinced, even to myself. “No disease is one hundred percent fatal.”

“That we know of,” Devin shot back. Then his face twisted as he looked back down at our mother, at her strangely waxy and sunken features. “Is there anything else we can do? Like, I don’t know, ice packs or something?”

“Maybe,” I said. It was worth a try. Covering her in ice packs would complete the ruin of her outfit, but I doubted that mattered much at the moment.

Glad to have something to do, Devin and I went to the kitchen and got out some big gallon-sized plastic storage bags and started filling them with ice. That seriously depleted our current ice supply, but I knew the ice-maker would start chugging away in an attempt to make up the deficit.

“How are you feeling?” I asked as we zipped up the last bag.

“Fine,” he said. “I mean, I feel…weird…but I don’t feel sick.”

That about sized it up. Weird, but not sick. The world was tilting beneath us, but neither of us knew what to do about it.

I set the bags I carried down on the coffee table, not worried about whether the cold and the moisture would mar the wooden surface. Such concerns seemed miles away from where we were right now. “I want to check her temperature again first,” I told Devin, picking up the thermometer and slipping it into our mother’s mouth. She squirmed a bit, but I held firm, and she subsided. We waited as the seconds went by, and when the thermometer beeped, I was pulling it out before it was even done.

When I looked at the readout, I couldn’t believe what it said.

“One hundred and seven point two,” I read as my stomach began to knot. So much for the ibuprofen and the cold towels.

Devin’s dark eyes were practically round, they widened so much. “That’s not possible…is it?”

“Well, it’s possible to have a fever that high,” I replied, then stopped there. It wouldn’t do much good to point out that such an unnaturally high fever could result in brain and organ damage…and that there wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it, apparently. I drew in a breath and added, “Let’s get the ice on her. Obviously, the cold compresses weren’t enough.”

He nodded, and I picked up the bags full of ice I’d placed on the coffee table. I wasn’t even sure of the best positioning of the ice packs, but I figured she’d need one on her head, and some up against her sides, maybe on her chest….

The bag in my left hand went on her forehead, and the one in my right down on her chest. She winced, although her eyes didn’t open. The bag I’d put on her chest shifted slightly, and I repositioned it. “Give me yours,” I told Devin, guessing that he wouldn’t feel very comfortable about setting bags full of ice on his mother’s body. From the alacrity with which he handed them off, I had a feeling my guess was correct. I placed those two on either side of her waist, trying to position them in such a way that they’d get maximum contact with her torso. It was the core that needed to get cooled down. Or at least, I thought that was how it worked.

She didn’t like it, I could tell — she kept shifting slightly, trying to get away from the cold, but she was so weak that her movements were ineffectual. Still, if she moved around much more than that, I’d have to find some way to secure the ice packs in place. There had to be some rope or twine or something like that in the garage.

I wondered if I should send Devin out to fetch it. He was staring down at our mother, glassy-eyed, as if not quite able to take in what was happening to her.

Then I saw the way he swayed on his feet, and a wave of cold that had nothing to do with the ice packs I’d just handled washed over me.

“Devin?” I asked, and it seemed it took him far longer than it should for him to glance over at me.

His pupils appeared to have dilated until they were so large that the black almost swallowed up the warm brown of his irises. “Huh?”

“How do you feel?” I enunciated the words carefully so there would be no chance for him to misunderstand.

“Um…weird.”

I went to him and put my hand on his forehead. He didn’t flinch away, which told me something was very wrong. Actually, the clammy heat against my palm told me everything I needed to know.

When I spoke, the words sounded as if they were coming from very far away, as if someone other than myself was saying them. “Devin, why don’t you go upstairs and get