My heart was breaking. I could feel it…literally feel it. One piece torn away for my mother, the next for Devin. And when my father went, did that mean my heart would finally shatter once and for all, gone to dust like everyone else in the world?
Cramming my fist into my mouth to push back another one of those ragged sobs, I went out to the hallway and staggered over to the carved wooden balustrade on the landing. I wrapped my fingers around the rail and hung on as if for my life. No fever scorched its way through me, but I felt as weak as though my temperature was 110 degrees.
Beloved, it will all be over soon.
That voice again. 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 downstair
s 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 on the phone. Now the quiet pounded against my eardrums, and I realized how big a three-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot house could feel when you were the only one in it.
The only one in the world….
The thought whispered through my mind, and I did my best to ignore it. Surely if I were immune, and not just having extremely delayed-onset symptoms for some reason, that meant other people had to be immune, too. How many? I couldn’t begin to guess. I didn’t know the mortality rate of the disease. Even if 99.9% of the population was dead, that would leave around a thousand people still alive in the greater Albuquerque area, if I was doing my mental math correctly.
I turned on the overhead lights in the kitchen, then went through the house, turning on all the lamps. Maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to do — maybe advertising my presence would do more harm than good. But I couldn’t sit there in the dark, not after everything I’d been through that day. Besides, when I peeked out through the curtains, I saw mine wasn’t the only house on the street that was all lit up. Most likely the others just had their lights on because no one was around to turn them off, but it did make mine seem less conspicuous.
“Are you there?” I asked of the darkness. Even a voice that was only a product of my imagination was better than this deep, deep silence, the kind of quiet you should never hear if you lived in a big city.
No reply, of course. My gaze shifted to the remote control, still lying where I’d last dropped it on the coffee table. I didn’t want to turn on the television, not after what I’d seen the last time around. Would it all be static by now, or would that one station still be showing blaring red text with more quotes from Revelations?
I was too much of a coward to pick up the remote and find out.
But there was still the stereo, and all the CDs my parents wouldn’t get rid of, despite Devin and me telling them all that plastic just took up space and that they should just rip all their music off those CDs and then play it through Apple TV or something. And now I had to be grateful for their stubbornness, because that meant I could get up and choose something to blot out the silence. My father liked country, but old country, like Hank Williams and Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline, and my mother preferred classical. That sounded better to me right then, so I found her favorite, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, and put that on.
It actually was better, with the sound of an orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy on the piano drowning out that awful stillness. Or at least it was better until I realized that no one would ever play that piece live again, that there would be no more symphony orchestras or Arcade Fire concerts or anything, ever again.
“Oh, God,” I gasped, pushing myself up from the couch and running into the kitchen, where I turned on the faucet and splashed cold water in my face. As if that could begin to help. It was all too big to comprehend, so awful and enormous that I could literally feel the horror of it beginning to sink in, like some noxious chemical seeping into my skin.
And then it was as though strong, invisible arms wrapped around me, bringing with them a soothing warmth. Unseen lips brushed against my hair, and I heard the voice again.
Be strong, my love. Be strong for just a while longer.
Just as suddenly, the presence was gone. I held on to the tile of the kitchen counter, feeling the cool surface beneath my fingertips. In that moment, I truly wondered if I’d lost my mind.
What other explanation could there be?
Chapter Five
More because I knew I should eat something than because I had any appetite at all, I gathered myself enough to put a few slices of wheat bread in the toaster. Once they were done, I buttered them and set them on a plate, then headed back out to the living room, where Rachmaninoff still played to the empty space. Just as I was setting my plate down on the coffee table, the lights flickered and went out, and the CD slurred to a halt. Silence reigned once more.
Heart slamming painfully in my chest, I waited a second, then another. Surely this had to be just a glitch. In a second or two, the power would come back on.
But it didn’t. How could the power plants run, with no one left to manage them?
The blackness was absolute. From my camping days, I knew how dark, how very dark, our desert skies could be. This seemed worse, though, because this wasn’t the expected dark of a night out under the stars. I was in the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Luckily, my mother loved candles, and so there were already a pair of pillars in wrought-iron sconces on the mantel, and another pillar candle sitting on a metal leaf-shaped dish on an end table. She kept a long-handled lighter in one of the coffee table’s drawers, so I reached in and fumbled around for a few seconds before locating it. As soon as I pulled it out of the drawer, I pressed the button to activate the flame. That pushed back on the darkness a little, and it got that much better when I lit the candle on the table next to me. Then I had enough illumination that I could get up and light the candles on the mantel.
From there I went into the kitchen and found the sugar cookie–scented jar candle sitting on the breakfast bar, and lit that as well. Upstairs — well, I’d worry about that later. At least now I wasn’t blundering around in total darkness…and the candle flames weren’t bright enough that they would be seen through the drapes and blinds, all of which I quickly closed.
All the same, I knew there was one thing I really needed to do.
On the ground floor was a study that my parents shared, although in reality it was mostly my mother’s space, housing her desk and computer and several shelves full of books. On the opposite wall, though, was my father’s gun safe.
I knew the combination. He’d trusted me with that, just as he trusted me to be responsible when we went shooting and to clean the guns I used and follow all the safety rules he’d taught me. I wasn’t sure if Devin had known the combination, although I somehow doubted it; my father hadn’t given me that information until I turned twenty-one. And even though I might be the only person left alive in Albuquerque, no way was I sitting alone in this house without some means to protect myself.
The lock turned easily, of course. My father took as good care of the safe as he did the guns inside. There were a lot, too — in addition to his service Glock, he owned an AR-15 rifle, two shotguns, a small .22-caliber huntin
g rifle, a Ruger, a Beretta, and my favorite, the Smith & Wesson .357. Sort of an old-fashioned gun, but my accuracy had always been good with it. Besides, with a revolver, you didn’t have to worry about the gun jamming.
I set the candle I’d brought with me down on my mother’s desk, then opened the safe. Hanging from one of the sleeves on the door was the .357, and on the shelf directly opposite the gun, boxes of spare ammo. My father wasn’t exactly what you’d call a survivalist type, but he did believe in maintaining his supplies. If necessary, I could waste a lot of bad guys before I ran out. Not that there were probably any bad guys left. This was more for my own peace of mind than anything else.
After lifting the S&W from where it rested, I pushed the latch forward to release the barrel, then moved the latch outward. As I’d suspected, the chambers were empty — my father didn’t believe in leaving loaded handguns lying around, even in the safe. One by one, I dropped the bullets into the chambers, then closed the gun back up.
Habit made me shut the door to the gun safe as well, and make sure the lock was fully engaged. Maybe I was the only person left alive in Albuquerque…and maybe not. No matter what the reality of the situation might turn out to be, I didn’t think it was a very good idea to leave a fully stocked gun safe accessible to just anyone.
Picking up the candle with my free hand, I went back out to the living room. My toast was stone cold by then, but I made myself eat it, and then drank some more water. I set the gun down on the coffee table, within easy reach should I need it.
And then I leaned against the back of the couch and shut my eyes, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next. My entire family was gone — I had two grandparents still living, but I had no reason to believe they hadn’t suffered the same fate as my parents and brother. Three cousins and an aunt and uncle, all on my mother’s side; my father was an only child. Could this strange immunity that seemed to be protecting me have somehow sheltered any of them? Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Susan also lived here in Albuquerque, so it wouldn’t be that hard to try checking on them tomorrow, after the sun came up. No way was I venturing outside in the dark.
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