by Kate Morris
“Tristan?” she called from the other room.
“Yeah, coming,” he called back and went in the direction he’d seen her go.
He turned to the left and ended up facing a long hallway with quite a few doors. There was light spilling into the hall from halfway down. When he reached the open doorway, Tristan found her in a pantry room holding plastic storage containers.
“Here, could you help?” she requested.
“Sure,” he answered, rushing forward and taking all six boxes. They were rectangular, around ten inches wide by thirteen inches long with lids. “What is all this?”
“It’s for you,” she said. “Well, this one’s for you.”
She showed him a smaller box that was cardboard wrapped with a green ribbon and topped with a coordinating bow.
“You got me a gift?”
“No, well, yes. Sort of.”
He stared down at her, at the way her cheeks flushed so easily.
“They’re cookies,” she explained and picked two more containers off the shelf.
“Cookies,” he repeated.
“Yes, for helping me,” she said. “The other night. With…you know, everything. My mother and my sisters and I bake cookies once a month and deliver them to your base. Just to show our support and because I’m sure most of the men and women…”
“Men. No women. Not an integrated base.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. Anyway, we bake them homemade for the men there since they’re probably all far from home.”
“Wait a minute. Your mom’s the cookie lady? That’s legendary shit right there. I haven’t had any yet, but boy, do they talk about the cookie lady. It’s the best day of the month, according to the guys.” He smirked.
She laughed. “Really? Oh, that’s funny.”
“Wow, that’s really…” he didn’t have the words but went with, “nice.”
She took a deep breath and shrugged. When she exhaled, it was shaky for some reason.
“Okay, this is it,” she said, indicating they should leave. “I was going to bring them out to the base tomorrow, but you just saved me a trip.”
“Oh, okay, sure,” he returned and walked out first since he was blocking her exit. Maybe that’s why she seemed edgy. He could tell she wasn’t comfortable around him and actually probably didn’t like him, either, if he was being honest with himself. He turned and said, “I can get the lights.”
“They turn off automatically once the door is closed,” she explained and then demonstrated it.
“Cool,” he remarked.
She shrugged one shoulder this time. “With eight kids, the electric bill could be very costly with everyone leaving on lights all the time. My father believes in efficiency, so he had a lot of the lighting done this way.”
“Like the hallway at your place,” he remembered. “This house is like a bigger version of your place.”
“Yes, my father’s influence,” she told him again. “He had the home designed and built custom and wanted the barn to match and flow with consistency. Then when I told him I wanted to move out, he suggested we renovate the top of the barn to accommodate my needs instead.”
“Is that what you wanted?”
She shrugged, something he was picking up on as a nervous habit.
“I suppose so. It made the most sense. I don’t have to pay rent. I just pay my own portion of the utilities and save the rest.”
“Sounds like a sweet deal.”
She chuckled softly. “Yes, unless you count the lack of privacy.”
“True.”
“But we’re a close family…”
He nodded, “I gathered as much.”
Outside, thunder cracked again, this time seeming like it was rattling the whole house under his feet.
“Oh, boy,” she lamented. “This storm seems like it’s getting worse instead of better.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s been a while since I lived in Ohio. I forgot how bad the weather can turn.”
“Where have you been living?” she asked as they entered the kitchen again where she deposited her boxes on the countertop of the peninsula. He followed suit and set his there, too. Beyond the dining area, he could see some sort of atrium, a smaller room that was completely enclosed by glass and had black steel window and door frames. He noticed that most of the windows in her apartment were like that, too. He didn’t know as much as her father about architecture, but he knew enough to know that those were custom windows and custom meant expensive.
“All over. Wherever the Army wants me.”
“That must get terribly lonely,” she sympathized with sad, understanding eyes.
She didn’t understand at all, actually. This was a choice, his choice. He wanted this life. Even the solitude and loneliness. There were always plenty of women when he went on leave in any country in the world where he and his buddies in his unit would vacation for a weekend here or there who were willing to fill that void for the night. Anything more that was promised would’ve been a lie. They knew what they were signing up for. He wasn’t a romance and commitment kind of person anyway. Marriage wasn’t ever in his future. He’d never do that, not to a woman who would be under a cloud of deception that she could change him, fix him, or make him settle down. He saw what marriage looked like. It wasn’t beautiful like in the movies. That was all fairytale, happily ever after bullshit. It didn’t really exist.
“I like it,” he said. “I’m not complaining.”
“Still, being alone all the time would be hard.”
He hit her with a direct gaze, “I’d think you’d want that, at least every once in a while. Seven siblings? Man.”
She smiled gaily, fondly thinking of them. “They’re not so bad most of the time. We didn’t go to public school, so we all became each other’s best friends.”
“Guess that makes sense,” he said, staring at her. Damn, she was gorgeous. He obviously interrupted her getting out of the shower or something, and she wasn’t wearing makeup but was still gorgeous. Her eyelashes were so dark, though, that it made her look like she was wearing black eyeliner or whatever women used to look like that. Against the pale, silvery blue of her eyes, her dark eyelashes really stood out. Tristan caught himself staring too long, so he blurted the first thing that came to mind in order to stop gawking. “I talked to the sheriff.”
“What? You did?”
“Yeah, I would’ve called and told you, but…” he said, reminding her that she didn’t have her phone.
“Oh, right. Yes. Kind of hard to call someone when you’ve got their phone on you.”
“And I wouldn’t have had your number,” he hinted. There was a long pause as she pondered his words. When it kicked in, he followed up with, “Or would I?”
She cleared her voice and asked in a higher pitch, “What did the sheriff say?”
She was cute when she was being evasive and nervous. Or maybe just polite. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him there was no way in hell she would have given him her phone number. Not in a million years. Not if he were the last man on earth. Probably not even then.
He offered a small grin before telling her that the sheriff wasn’t saying anything, but his deputy sang like a canary. Tristan repeated his conversation with the young deputy.
“Why the secrecy?” she questioned when he was done.
Her eyebrows were a pale tan color, and there was a light splattering of matching freckles across her nose. Her lips were full and smooth. Not in a million years if he were the last man on earth and didn’t have a shady past.
“Dunno. I found that odd, too,” he agreed. Then he told her the information he’d found out about the strange flu, the casualty count from it, and how the young deputy thought “Steve” the nice guy turned raging psychopath had it, as well. None of it added up in his mind, but he wondered if she’d be able to piece anything together, something that he missed.
“That is odd, indeed,” she finally remarked, using his p
hrasing. Then she walked around to the other side of the peninsula and motioned for him to follow. He passed through an area that contained a wall of photographs. In one of the photos taken more recently, it was just Avery. She was wearing a short, pale blue dress and matching cardigan and was surrounded by children she was reading to. There were too many for them to be her siblings, and they all looked just slightly older than toddlers. She was holding a book. Her face was lit up with joy, a huge smile plastered on her mouth.
“Where’s your family?” he asked.
She said over her shoulder, “My father’s leaving in the morning for Hungary, so they took the children out to dinner and a movie.”
Tristan thought about that for a minute before sighing with frustration.
“You…you shouldn’t really tell strange men that you’re all alone out here in the middle of nowhere and that your family’s gone for the whole evening and your dad’s leaving town tomorrow for another country.”
She turned abruptly, and he almost ran her down. Avery plunked her hands on her slim hips and blasted him with a confused and angry expression.
“You asked me! If you think I shouldn’t tell you things like that, then why did you ask me?”
“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t just up and volunteer that much. You don’t even know me. I could be a serial killer or something.”
She cocked her head to the side in a jaunty manner and squinted one eye at him. “A serial killer who saved me from a person who clearly was deranged?”
“According to his friend, the deputy, he wasn’t deranged, never did anything like that before.”
“Interesting,” she said, turning around and walking again. “Let’s check this out online.”
There was a laptop at a small built-in desk in another hallway that was wider than the one with the cookie cave. He wanted a secret cookie cave in his retirement house. As he drew closer, he saw two more stations with computers just like this one.
“We take a lot of college classes and do a lot studying and research online,” she explained, picking up on his questioning look, and pulled out a chair for him beside the one she was planning on using. “Sit. Let’s see what’s out there about this.”
Reluctantly, he sat down. He felt like he shouldn’t even be at her house, but Tristan sat quietly while she typed away, her long, tapered nails painted a pale pink clicking on the keys.
“When I looked around on the web, I found a few chatrooms where moms were talking about their sick kids but not much else. If the government knows what’s going on, they’re covering it up. On an alternative news site, they’re saying hundreds of thousands have died from this.”
“Hundreds of thousands?” she asked on a gasp.
“Yeah,” he confirmed as she continued to type. He paused a moment before saying what he needed to say. “You know I’m one of your mother’s patients, right?”
She squirmed in her seat before offering him a sidelong glance full of trepidation.
“Yes, I saw you that day coming out of her office, of course,” she said. “I figured you didn’t remember me.”
“I’d have to have something wrong with me not to,” he mumbled.
She didn’t reply to that, just scooted her bottom forward on her chair.
“Pay attention,” she ordered with pluck and pointed at the screen.
He had to drag his gaze from her profile. “I am. What’d you find?”
“There’s a video on this site. I don’t know. This looks sketchy. Think it could be a virus?”
He was watching her keenly. She chewed her thumbnail with indecision and bobbed her head side to side as if weighing whether or not to click on the link. She reached up and pulled a clip from her hair, letting it fall down her back in loose waves. Avery looked directly at him. She smelled good.
“Well? Do you? Should we click?”
Tristan reached past her and picked up a tiny ceramic chicken. She took it from him and set it back down. He noticed she was careful not to touch him.
“Don’t get sidetracked,” she scolded.
Tristan hadn’t been reprimanded since he was a little kid. She seemed quite at ease doing so repeatedly.
“Ready?” she asked but immediately turned and clicked on the link without waiting for him to answer one way or the other.
The video started out with some strange looking dude spouting off about government conspiracy theories and manmade, engineered viruses meant to be used as biological warfare against other countries. They watched about ten minutes until he introduced a guest, a person who wouldn’t be filmed and was supposedly a recently fired healthcare worker. Her voice was slightly altered to further conceal her identity.
“And you were a researcher at…” the video did a long beep to cover the name of the hospital or facility. She answered that she was. “And you say the cases of RF1 here in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past two weeks?”
“Yes, sir,” she stated. “Nearly forty thousand that I know of.”
“What’s RF1?” Avery asked, pressing pause.
“That’s what they’re calling that flu I was telling you about,” Tristan told her and got a single nod before she started the video once more.
“…and we’ve already had twenty thousand deaths reported in Africa,” the woman on the screen was saying. “In my field of research in infectious disease, there hasn’t been any cure. Antibiotics aren’t working. Neither are the antivirals. The fevers spike so high the patients are suffering permanent brain damage. It seems to be affecting children worse. The survival rates we’re seeing in children is below twenty-five percent.”
Avery gasped delicately. “Oh, my goodness. That’s…”
She didn’t finish, just shook her head and pressed her thin fingertips to her lips.
“…in the United States, as many as four thousand deaths have been reported…” the woman said but was cut off.
“Wait a minute,” the host said. “Nowhere is there a record of that. I looked before you came on today.”
“They don’t want people to start panicking,” his guest said with confidence. “Imagine if everyone knew that people were dropping every minute around the globe from this and will be doing the same here soon. They’d never send their children to school. They wouldn’t go to work. The country would effectively be shut down in a matter of days.”
“Can this be true?” Avery asked with frightened eyes that caged and held Tristan in a speechless state. “Surely not. Surely this is wrong. We would’ve heard of something this terrible. This is the first time I’m hearing anything about this.”
“The guy at the bar was sick,” he said. “He…wasn’t right. And the cops know what’s going on. That deputy kid said so. They were given strict instructions on how to handle it, too.”
“Did they take him to a hospital?” she asked. “Maybe we could see him. You know, just to…see. Maybe we’re blowing things out of proportion. It was really dark in that bar.”
“He was sick and…” Tristan said, stopping mid-sentence. He couldn’t find the right words to describe him. “Fucked up.”
She flinched at his description. Avery looked back at the computer screen instead and tapped the play button again.
“…and you say the virus has mutated?” the host asked.
“Yes, sir,” she answered. “It was an accident. They didn’t mean for this to happen. In all likelihood, it mutated to preserve itself. Think about it. If someone were trying to annihilate you, you’d do everything you could to stop it from happening. That’s what the virus did. It mutated. They’re calling the mutation RF2.”
“And is the mortality rate the same?”
“We’re not sure yet. What we do know is that the patients become extremely violent, act irrationally, if you will. They lose basic cognitive functions like speech and clear vision.”
The video stopped abruptly, and a message popped up, Video Has Been Removed Due to Inappropriate Content Upload.
“What?”
Avery asked. “What the heck happened? Where’d it go?”
“That just got flagged. It’s time stamped right now, or one minute ago as being updated.”
“Updated? You mean removed.”
“Guess so,” he agreed.
“Tristan,” she said his name, causing him to stare hard at her. Something about her using his name made his guts twist. She swiveled in her wooden seat, bringing her leg up under her to face him better. “Do you think this stuff is true? I mean, if it is, this is…this is…”
She was getting ready to go into full meltdown mode. He could tell.
“Nah, probably not,” he said. “Probably just some crackpots on the internet drumming shit up for attention.”
“She said people are dying from this and…and going crazy. What if that man, Steven or Steve or whatever his name was, had this? He had his hands all over me. You were touching him, too. What if we get it? We could…”
“Calm down,” he said in a soothing manner, which didn’t help at all.
“Calm down? Tens of thousands of people worldwide are dead, Tristan,” she stated. “Something is off about this whole thing. They hauled that man away. They didn’t even want to talk to me about it, or you. I mean, you nearly killed him.”
“I didn’t…”
“And I could get the kids sick,” she went on a bit of a hysterical rant. Then she stood up and paced up and down the hall, causing the lights to turn on and off as she went. It was so creepy but apparently didn’t faze her in the least because she was used to it.
