“Why aren’t the news channels saying much about it?” Eve heard Seth ask as she stepped into the open door of the bathroom that was right next to her parents’ bedroom door. She wasn’t sure why she was being so sneaky, but she felt as if they would clam up as they normally did around her if she entered the room. She had always felt that the three of them kept her in the dark about things, and she knew if she went into the room, they would stop talking or change the subject.
Her grandfather had been the only man in her life who hadn’t treated her like a little girl. Even when she was younger, he was the only person who would be completely truthful with her about things. Her parents would get so angry with him and say he was stealing her youth, but she had never felt as if he had. Her grandmother claimed that Eve and Abner shared the same soul; they were so much alike.
“I’m not sure why the media is avoiding the subject. Maybe they don’t know what is going on either. I would lay money that that idiot of a president is behind this,” Ross said with a hint of anger in his voice.
His sons wouldn’t hear a word of this, though. They had both been firm supporters of President Darren Thornton and refused to believe any of the rumors about the man that had been circulating since his reelection four years ago. Her grandfather had always distrusted the man and his vice president. He had spent much of their first few years reporting on everything the mainstream media ignored. Their father had also supported him, even voted for him, twice, but after everything he had been through, he had slowly begun to lose confidence in the man.
“Come on dad, you’re sounding like granddad. Thornton is just a man, a normal guy. How could he have done anything this monumental?”
“I cannot believe you two still think that man is innocent, especially after everything that has happened. I’m not saying he did this, but I’m with dad in believing it is very possible,” Eve said finally making her appearance.
Her brothers rolled their eyes at her and turned to walk away, talking to themselves. Ross walked over and put his arm around her shoulders. He didn’t say anything; there were no words that would have comforted either one of them.
As the boys began to descend the stairs, she heard one of them mention the earthquake that had struck the west coast the year Thornton and Christian Black, Thornton’s vice president, entered office, and the other agreed with whatever it was the first had said. As the rumors and scandals surrounding Thornton and Black rose over the years, their staunch supporters used what their opposition called the “Earthquake Defense” to defend them. The defense had long ago stopped working, and when confronted with all the evidence of the things that have come afterwards, most of his supporters walked off without saying a word.
Eve found it funny that Thornton supporters base their “Earthquake Defense” on the very thing Thornton tried to cover up. Nine months into his first year, the largest earthquake to hit North America in recorded history struck. The quake redesigned California and Mexico’s coastline. A tsunami that followed the earthquake completely submerged most of the Hawaiian Islands. The United States Geological Survey and local authorities tried evacuating the islands, but for most people the evacuation came too late. The quake also separated a large section of the state of California and the Baja Peninsula from the North American Continent.
Thornton’s administration reacted quickly, but, according to Eve’s grandfather, managed to keep the event in the news long enough to push the president’s divorce due to multiple affairs under the rug. By the time everything died down, people were so used to seeing the man alone they had all but forgotten he had been married.
When his supporters used the Earthquake Defense, they ignored the fact that the person bringing it up wasn’t talking about the earthquake at all but were talking about his wife and the affairs.
“Honey, you look tired,” Ross said, looking pensively down at his daughter. “Why don’t you go lie down and rest for a while.” He tilted Eve’s head up so that he looked directly at her, showing her how serious he was about her resting.
“What about. . .”
“There are too many people here for anyone to notice that you’re gone,” her father argued, leading her out into the hall and toward her old bedroom.
“You don’t think mom will need help with Caleb?” she questioned with a bit of a yawn in her voice. She let her father lead her, like a child, into her room. She really did want some sleep.
“Your mother has plenty of help. If she needs you, I will come and get you.” He kissed her lightly on the top of the head before heading back downstairs.
Stripping down to her white slip, Eve pulled back the covers on her childhood bed and crawled inside. A smile spread across her face when she smelled the fresh scent of sheets and thought of her mother coming up here once a week to change and wash them.
Nearly a year had passed since she had slept in that bed; she missed everything about it. After Jayna’s funeral, she had escaped to her own apartment, not able to handle all the memories the house held.
In the past, she would have had to strip the bed of its many layers of blankets, but on that day, she had welcomed the tight, consuming feeling of the blankets. They made her feel snug and safe. In addition, her parents had cut off the heat to her room and the hard January weather had the room freezing.
She lay there for a while trying to sleep. Sleep should have come, but her mind kept going back to the last thing she heard her brothers talking about. The Earthquake happened nearly seven years before. Luckily, she hadn’t had to live through it because it had happened on the opposite coast, although, she could tell anyone the story as if she lived it because her aunt and cousins had lived through it, and they told the story to anyone who would listen. At first, the family had listened intently every time they told the story, but after a year of listening to it, they quickly became annoyed with the repetition.
Her thoughts then started to roam through the events of the last few years. Event after event flipped through her head, but she couldn’t grasp onto anyone of them for any length of time. A soft knock on her bedroom door brought her back to reality. She looked up to see the door open a hair.
“Eve?” Doyle softly whispered through the open crack.
“Come in,” she whispered back.
He stepped in and quietly shut the door, shutting out the muffled commotion coming from downstairs.
“Your dad told me where you were. I hope you don’t mind me coming up. Did I wake you?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to go away so you can sleep?”
“No, I want you to hold me.”
Her eyes glittered with the hint of tears that never fell.
He shook off his jacket, stepped out of his shoes, and crawled into the bed behind her. She snuggled back into him, closing her eyes.
“Thank you for coming. It really means a lot to me that you are here.”
“You’re welcome.”
Within minutes, she was asleep. Doyle waited nearly twenty minutes for her to fall completely into REM mode before slipping out of the bed and going back downstairs. He was sure Eve’s parents would need help with something, but he intended to come back up in an hour or so to check on her.
----------
By the time February rolled around, the virus had hit the news, and hard. No other piece of news was more important. Enough of the populace had died in the course of a single month that people were demanding to know what was happening. Automobile wrecks were on the rise with so many people dying behind the wheel of sudden heart attacks, strokes, and other things; so much so that most people were opting to not leave their homes, or, if they absolutely had to, they walked. After about a half a dozen planes fell from the sky, the airlines shut down. The outside world was becoming a dangerous place and people wanted to know why.
Anonymous people, possibly government people, had begun to leak small amounts of information about the sickness to the media, but most of the so-called big shots continued to claim t
hat everything was going to be fine. No one confirmed the cause of the virus, but there were plenty of theories. Every minute people phoned radio and news stations and posted on multiple social media websites their opinions, theories, and stories.
The head of the Department of Medicine at North Richardson University was dominating some of the local news stations as well. He was discussing the tests he had been running on donated bodies. The department head said the same things Eve’s brother had said that day after Gene’s funeral. Whatever kind of virus it was, it was speeding up and mutating any kind of ailment a person has or gets, no matter how mediocre. He went on to say that he had seen normal benign ovarian cysts expand into full blown cancer in a matter of weeks, a common nose bleed cause a nine year old to hemorrhage to death, and a bee sting to swell to the point of bursting, killing the victim instantly.
On the third of February, Eve buried her father. Her family buried Gwen on the sixth and the Forbs on the eighth. Shortly after that, both of her brothers fell sick, along with most of their families. Eve, her mom, and her nephew Caleb moved in with her grandma Yana on the weekend of the twelfth. The four of them were feeling fine. No signs of illness. Eve had moved back in with her parents shortly after Gene’s death because Hannah hadn’t come back after winter break and she couldn’t afford the rent on their apartment. She had also developed a sudden need to be as close to her parents as she could get.
Eve dropped all of her classes in order to stay at home with her mom and help take care of Caleb and her grandma; not that it mattered. All of her classes had been small when the semester started, and within a month, half of those students and faculty were no longer showing up or were dead. The school newspaper tried to keep a running death toll, but the university was too large and the list was threatening to consume the paper. Of course within a month’s time there weren’t enough people left to help put the paper together or to read it, for that matter, to waste time and energy compiling the list.
By the time her brothers and most of their families had passed away, February was nearly over. The funeral homes and churches were no longer maintaining services. The cemeteries were so full that the only option people had for the disposal of bodies was cremation, and the waiting lists for that were too long. Some people opted to bury their own dead while others simply left their dead on hospital and funeral home doorsteps for them to take care of. There were rumors that people were using landfills as body dumps, and that once the landfills were full, they were burning the bodies. Other rumors spoke of groups of people getting together and burning bodies in mass graves on private land.
In the last week of the month, Eve’s niece Reese and nephew Toby came to live with them, bringing the number of residence in the Whitecloud household to six. Luckily, the house was so big that even with that many people, they weren’t stepping over each other and the kids had plenty of room to play.
Doyle stuck by her, standing beside her like the perfect, dutiful boyfriend he was while they attended all of the hospital visits, funerals, and wakes. His parents were the only family he had, so aside from the occasional death of a friend his life hadn’t changed much. Eve had come to depend on him so much that she was devastated when he told her he would be leaving.
His father had gotten sick while on a business trip to Chicago. He was unable to come back home, so Doyle was going to have to take his mother there to be with him. Eve feared that it would be a long time before she would see him again. She couldn’t bring herself to admit that with the rate the sickness was killing people that either one or both of them would be dead before he returned.
“The virus is mutating and altering as it enters each new host. It is reacting to each person’s own specific DNA and becoming an enhanced version of anything the person already has or anything he or she may come in contact with. Even something the person may not know they have encountered can kill them. This time of the year is the worst because in most people it is going to look like the flu,” a doctor was saying on another random news show Eve and Doyle were watching.
Nothing but news aired those days. The regularly scheduled programs were on permanent hiatus. The local news broadcasts had become the program of choice because people were hoping, waiting for someone to announce that there was a cure.
“Doctor, are you saying that everyone is susceptible to the virus. That most, if not all, of us are going to catch this thing and die from it?” the news anchor asked, looking very frightened.
“Yes. As of right now, I don’t know if anyone will survive. I want to say that there might be some people that will be immune, there usually are, but with the data I have come up with and have received from others in my field, it doesn’t look good for any of us.”
“Do you think it wise to make such a claim?” the anchorwoman asked with a tremor in her voice.
“Well, that kind of depends. I could go back to my office tonight run some more tests and find something that will change everything for us, but at this point I find that highly unlikely.”
Eve flipped the channel only to come across another station airing an earlier interview with the same doctor. The anchor was slightly older than the last and the doctor was wearing a suit rather than a white button up shirt and kakis but other than that, the interview was pretty much the same.
“What about a cure?” this second anchorwoman asked, seeming to perk up at the doctor’s previous comment.
“With current data as it is right now, there is none, and with the deadly rate the virus is spreading, I’m afraid that for most of us one will not come in time. Doctors from all over the world are working on this and openly sharing information, but no one has even come close to a breakthrough.”
The news anchor announced the need to break for commercial, and Eve changed the channel again. Commercials—she laughed at the idea of commercials—almost all of the commercials airing were pharmaceutical. The big pharmacy companies were pushing everything from Nyquil to Dramamine to big name drugs Eve couldn’t pronounce to help stave off the sickness. They were one of the few businesses making any real money. People stopped going shopping unless they absolutely needed something. They stopped going out to eat, to the movies, or anywhere else where there might be large numbers of infected people for them to encounter.
“Do you really have to go?” Eve asked, cuddling up as close as she could to Doyle.
“You know I do. Mom is in no shape to make that drive, and she is insisting on going up there to be with him. And you know she will just take off without me. Besides, if I don’t go, he will kill me for leaving him alone with her constant nagging.”
They tried to laugh at his joke, but their laughter sounded so forced that they both sort of halted mid-chuckle and gave each other a sad little grin.
“I know, it is just with all of this,” she said, pointing to the television screen, “going on, I really need and want you here.”
“I wish I could stay, babe.” He hugged her tight to him as he whispered, “I love you.”
“I know. I love you too…What time are you leaving tomorrow?” she asked, wiping away silent tears.
“Early. Mom wants to be on the road by dawn.”
This statement shocked her to the point that she jerked her head off his chest to look him in the face to be sure he wasn’t joking with her.
“I guess that means you cannot stay the night?” she asked suggestively, even though she was in no mood to have sex.
“No, and you know your mother would never allow it. You could stay with me.” He kissed her deep, showing her how much he really wanted her to.
“I want to, but I should really stay and help mom with all of these kids. I’m getting payback from God for adamantly declaring that I didn’t want any kids.” She tried joking this time, but neither one of them found it the least bit humorous.
They had been talking about marriage and kids over the winter break. The subject had come up while they were having dinner with their parents. Both his and her mother had confro
nted Doyle about the subject. He had jokingly blown them off, but he and Eve had an in-depth discussion about it that night and decided they wanted to wait until one of them graduated college before making that kind of commitment.
Resigned to his leaving, she curled back into him. Doyle stayed until midnight. Eve’s mother had come in twice to “check” on them, so they took the hint. Her mother didn’t know Doyle would be leaving the next day, if she had she might have let him stay, but they didn’t want to press the matter. Eve walked him to his car, refusing to cry until he had pulled away and disappeared down the road.
When she could no longer see his headlights, she turned, looked back at the dark house with blurry eyes, then looked away and began walking down the empty street. She still had the keys to her old apartment. The place was empty, and with the university all but empty, many of the apartments around campus were empty. She wanted to be alone. She just prayed Hannah hadn’t sent for her things yet. Sleeping on the floor wasn’t an appealing thought; neither was having a crying baby wake her in the morning.
She chided herself for not going with Doyle. Yet, she knew if she had, she would have just kept him up all night with her tears, and sleep deprivation didn’t work well when you had to drive all the next day. Also, she was sure if she had stayed with him, she might have left with him the next morning instead of staying behind and helping her mother, a thing she knew was more important.
The apartment was dark, lifeless, and no more than a ten-minute walk from her grandmother’s house. She and Hannah had had some great times in the apartment. Eve thought sometimes that the reason she had been procrastinating finishing her last few classes was because she hadn’t wanted to give up the apartment and her life with Hannah; trading it all for an adult life that she knew she wasn’t ready for.
Alone Page 4
