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

too far away for me to have heard him unless he’d all but shouted the word. At any rate, it hadn’t sounded like my father’s voice. It was somewhat deep like his, but more rounded around the edges, with the faintest hint of an accent I couldn’t even begin to identify.

“Who’s there?” I whispered, feeling like an idiot even as the words left my lips.

No reply, of course. I was only imagining things. No one had ever called me “beloved.” Hell, only one person had ever even told me he loved me. Colin, the boyfriend of my junior and senior years of college. It had taken me a while to realize his “love” wasn’t the kind I wanted — he said those things to keep me placated, to keep me from noticing that he was banging at least two other girls on the side.

I’d gone to the clinic right after I dumped him and had myself tested for every disease it was possible to be tested for, and I was fine, but that experience had scarred me. I hadn’t gotten past a second date ever since. Third dates were when things could start to get serious, when you might end up in the sack together. So I always made sure to end relationships before they got to that stage. No opportunities for anyone to be calling me “beloved,” that was for sure.

And then I decided that the stress of the day had gotten to me, and I was hearing things. Or were auditory hallucinations another byproduct of a high fever? I didn’t know for sure; apparently, I hadn’t spent enough time hanging out on WebMD.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t tell me anything concrete, I couldn’t help putting my hand up to my forehead. No discernible change in temperature that I could tell, which meant I wasn’t running a fever. No tingles or chills or any of the other telltales of my internal temperature being anything other than what it should be.

I decided that standing there and trying to determine whether I was sick or crazy wasn’t helping anyone, so I went upstairs to check on Devin. The door to my parents’ room was closed, and I knew better than to knock. My father would come out when he was ready. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he’d seen today, and I knew he needed this time alone with his wife. It wasn’t a question of if, but when; the human body just couldn’t survive at temperatures like that. She should be in a hospital getting IV drips and ice baths and Lord knows what else. An economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen and some half-assed bags of ice from the freezer weren’t going to cut it.

Tears began to prick at my eyes, and I blinked them away. I’d already cried once today, and I knew I’d probably have plenty more reasons to weep by the time this was all over. Or maybe by then I’d be sick, too, and I wouldn’t know what was happening to me. That was one blessed thing about this entire nightmare — once people got hit by that fever, it scrambled their brains so much they didn’t seem to be aware of what was happening to them. Thank God for small mercies.

I opened Devin’s door a crack and saw that he had fallen into the fitful phase of the disease — twitching and jerking, his forehead sheened with sweat. Even though I knew it probably wouldn’t do any good, I went to the upstairs bathroom and shook three capsules of ibuprofen out of the big bottle in the cabinet there, then pulled a little paper cup from the dispenser and filled it with water.

Just as I was approaching his bed, Devin’s leg jerked out and hit my arm, causing the water to splash all down my front, soaking the knit top I wore. I muttered a curse, but he didn’t even seem to realize what he’d done, and that was how I knew he must be completely out of it. At any other time, he would’ve burst out laughing at managing to kick water all over me.

Pulling in a breath, I did an about-face and went back to the bathroom, plucked a towel off the rack, and did the best I could to blot the worst of the moisture from my shirt. Then I refilled the paper cup and went back to my brother’s bedroom, approaching with care from the side so he wouldn’t catch me unawares again.

That kick seemed to have consumed the last of his strength, because he was lying on his back, one arm flopped over the side of the bed. I went to him and murmured, “Here’s some medicine for you, Dev.”

The water first, since that had worked well with both Taylor and my mother. He drank, and didn’t protest when I dropped a pill on his tongue and made him swallow, then gave him some more water. I repeated the process two more times, giving him one last sip to empty the cup, my arm under his head to steady him. He did drink, then collapsed against the pillow when he was done.

Was any of that going to do him any good? Or was I just doing something…anything…to make myself feel less helpless?

Probably the latter, although I wasn’t quite ready to admit it to myself.

Since Devin seemed to be sleeping again, I decided I could leave him for a bit. Pulling out the chair and sitting next to him felt a little too much like keeping watch over someone’s deathbed, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Also, I’d just realized I was thirsty, too — I hadn’t had anything to drink since I’d come home several hours earlier.

So I slipped out of my brother’s room and went back down the stairs. The door to my parents’ room was still shut, and I felt a completely unworthy stab of irritation. Yes, it must be terrible for my father, but I doubted my mother even knew he was there, whereas I needed him, needed someone to talk to. But I knew I would never disturb him, so I kept going to the kitchen. Once there, I pulled a glass from the cupboard and held it up to the ice dispenser. A few cubes half-heartedly spilled out, and I guessed it was working overtime to replenish what I’d already used in my futile attempt to reduce my mother’s fever.

I sat down on one of the stools at the breakfast bar and stared out the window, not really focusing on anything. Since our house was on a corner, the view included the low juniper hedges planted against the fence, and a fairly unobstructed glimpse of the street beyond. As I watched, a silver car wove its way down the street, listlessly drifting from one side of the narrow residential lane to the other, actually hitting one curb before correcting and moving toward the one opposite, like the world’s biggest and slowest pinball. It finally came to rest halfway up on the sidewalk on the corner across from our property, almost touching the smooth green lawn Mr. D’Ambrosio took such pride in, when most everyone else in the neighborhood had long since given up on grass and had switched over to cactus- and evergreen-studded drought-tolerant landscaping.

No one came out of the D’Ambrosio house to check on the driver, which told me Mr. and Mrs. D’Ambrosio must be as incapacitated as whoever had been driving that Camry. In that moment, I was just glad the driver had only been going twenty miles an hour at the most. Anything else, and they could have caused a lot more damage.

Footsteps coming down the hall made me turn, and I saw my father approaching. His eyes looked red, but otherwise his face was still and calm, as if he’d made his peace with whatever was happening to my mother, to Devin…to the world.

The words made their way to my lips before I even realized I was saying them. “Is she…?”

“No.” His gaze shifted to the glass of water sitting on the counter in front of me, and he gave a faint nod. He went and got his own glass from the cupboard, and got some water as well, although I noticed he didn’t bother with the ice. Afterward, he sat down next to me on one of the barstools and added, “Not yet, anyway.”

“How…how long?”

“I don’t know.” He drank some water, and I decided I should as well, although it seemed to get jammed halfway down my throat, lodging there as if it was a solid object instead of liquid. “It…varies, from what I’ve seen and heard.”

I didn’t know why, but for some reason that bothered me almost as much as anything else that had happened so far. If a disease was going to be this evil, it should at least be predictable.

The question had been torturing me all afternoon, and now I finally had someone I could ask it of. “Dad…why isn’t anyone helping? Why are we being left to deal with this alone?”

A long pause, during which he stared down at his glass of water without meeting my eyes. When he did look up, I almost wished I hadn’t been watching him, waiting for his response. Never in my life had I seen such an expression of despair on my father’s face. Despair…and fury.

“Because there’s no one to help, Jess. What’s happening here in Albuquerque — it’s happening everywhere. New York. Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. and London and Moscow and — everywhere.” His hands, his big, strong, capable hands, now somehow looked limp and broken as they rested on the counter. “There’s no answer at the CDC. Tried calling in the National Guard for help, and nothing. The only good thing about the whole situation is that people are getting sick so quickly, they don’t have time to get into trouble. The fever makes them incapable of violence, of looting. Most collapse where they stand. That’s why I said that Devin was lucky — you got him into bed, and he’s sleeping. The fever doesn’t have him hallucinating and having convulsions or seizures, like I saw happen with some people today.”

“So…that’s it?” I whispered. “We all just sit back and wait to die?”

He scrubbed his hand over his face and glanced away from me. “I don’t know. There’s no way to treat this thing. Either you get it, or you don’t. Or rather, I have yet to see anyone who hasn’t caught it, but…you’re not sick.”

“Yet,” I said flatly, then drank some water.

“Usually, you’d be sick by now, since you’ve been around infected people.”