by Caleb Cleek
I gripped the oval knob with my left hand. Before I turned it, I observed the distorted view of my wife through the cut glass in the door. I hesitated before turning the knob, wondering what sort of state she was going to be in. It didn’t matter. She needed me, whatever state she was in. I twisted the knob and pushed it inward. The door swung in, revealing my wife just outside its arc of travel.
My eyes met her hers. After seven years of marriage, I still caught myself wondering if eyes could truly be that deep of a blue. It took two months of dating for her to convince me that she wasn’t wearing colored contacts. I had never seen eyes more striking than my wife’s. Today, however, the blue was hardly noticeable in light of how bloodshot her eyes were from crying.
I set Toby on the ground and Katie flew into my arms. At five foot five, she wasn’t tall. She wasn’t short either. It put her at the perfect height to bury her head in my shoulder.
“Connor, what are we going to do?” she asked, starting to cry again.
“I guess that’s up to Toby,” I said, looking down at him. “What do you want to do, big guy?” I asked, already knowing what the answer would be. “You get to pick what we do this afternoon.”
“Then we’re playing Monopoly!” he exclaimed, with a smile spreading across his face. Monopoly had been Toby’s favorite game since he got it for Christmas. Given a choice, that was what he always wanted to do.
“All right!" I said, mustering forth every bit of excitement I could dredge up. “I’m the car.” My attempt to get a reaction from Toby by claiming his usual game piece worked as I anticipated.
“Oh no you're not!” Toby burst out. “The car is mine. You have to be the wheelbarrow so you can carry all my money around for me.”
"Oh yeah? Well you're not going to have any money to haul around after you land on my Boardwalk and Park Place. They’re going to be full of hotels," I laughed.
The corners of Katie's mouth slowly crept upward. "Neither of you are going to have any money if you don't pop some popcorn,” she said between sniffles, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Everyone knows you can't play Monopoly without popcorn. While you two are arguing about who gets which piece, I am going to go hide some money up my sleeve so I have a head start.” Katie had long ago been banned from being the banker in any Monopoly game because she was such a cheater.
“You are definitely coming with us.” I grabbed her from behind, wrapped my left arm under her knees, my right arm around her torso, and picked her up and carried her into the kitchen, “Why don’t you make yourself useful and melt some butter?” As I was putting Katie down, Toby was banging through the cabinet, pulling out the air popper.
“Don’t forget to grab the bowl while you’re down there,” I said as I reached into the cabinet above the stove and removed a half empty jar of Orville Redenbacher popcorn from the top shelf.
I was at my maximum extension when Katie jabbed her index fingers into either side of my rib cage. I am not overly ticklish, but it was enough to cause me to drop the jar of popcorn. It landed on the countertop, bounced off and hit the floor. The red plastic lid popped off the container and a profusion of golden kernels leaped and bounced across the tile floor.
Toby saw the whole thing coming. He had just finished his outburst of laughter from the car. The tickling and then the spilled popcorn sent him over the edge again. He was barely able to wheeze out a brief sentence in the midst of his roils of laughter and he stole Katie’s line, “Dad, you’re such a pig.” Katie had had to explain long ago that people sometimes called the police “pigs.” He loved the analogy and tried to beat Katie to it whenever I made a mess.
When the popcorn was finished, we settled into a vicious game of Monopoly.
Toby caught Mom cheating twice and gleefully brought the accusation against her. Both times she was forced to pay a five hundred dollar fine.
In a magical moment, the passage of time ceased and knowledge of what was happening around us melted away. Time did not begin its onward march until Toby emerged as the undisputed winner. I looked at my watch and realized three hours had passed since we began. I looked from Katie to Toby. Toby was still all smiles. His high pitched laughter filled the room as he bragged about his uncanny ability to catch Mom cheating.
She took the teasing and dished it back to him. While I enjoyed the interaction between the two of them, I realized it was pushing six hours since I had first been exposed to the infection. It was nearly four hours since Katie and Toby were exposed.
I should be dead. They should be well on their way.
“Toby, come here and let me look at your face.” He quickly scurried on all fours, barking like a dog, all the way across the room to where I was sitting on the floor. I looked at the left side of his cheek and noted five scabs. The one just below his eye was about a quarter of an inch long. It was shallow, but there was no question that it was big enough to permit entrance of the infection into his body. The infection had failed to take hold.
“Katie, tell me again about your interaction with Claire.” She recounted the story for the second time. Between the coughing and saliva flying in her face, there was enough exposure that Katie should have been sick.
I thought back to Doc Baker’s description of the infection and tried to remember what he had said about the case of immunity. The only way a child could be immune was if both parents were immune. If both parents were immune, all their offspring would be immune. If I understood him right, and Toby was immune, it meant that both Katie and I were immune, too. My exposure was complete as was Toby’s. Katie’s description of her incident with Claire didn’t leave any hope, either. I hardly dared to voice my discovery for fear it would be proved wrong, but my mounting excitement was too much for me to keep to myself. “We’re immune to the disease! We aren’t going to die!” I blurted out, eclipsing whatever Toby had been rattling about to Katie.
Katie turned toward me with raised eyebrows, her mouth slightly open. “What are you talking about?”
I quickly rehashed Doc Baker’s description of the genetics of immunity to the disease. At the completion, her mouth was wide open. She stared at me for a couple seconds and let out a sudden whoop. She dove on me, nearly knocking me over, and kissed me on the mouth. It was a long kiss. She pulled back and looked into my eyes with tears welling up in hers.
“Are we really going to be okay?” A tear rolled out of her right eye. She quickly brought up her right index finger, mopped the residual moisture from her cheek, and then rubbed the saline liquid from both eyes.
Chapter 12
“I said we aren’t going to die from the disease. I didn’t say we are in the clear. There are fifteen hundred people in town and at least that many more in the surrounding areas. If the disease isn’t contained, all of these people are going to become infected.” I described the blood lust of the infected I had come in contact with and how difficult it had been to kill them. We needed to fortify our house if we were going to have a chance of surviving.
“Toby, I’m going to need your help. We’re going to take the lumber we bought to build the shed and use it to cover up all the windows.”
As I walked to the gun safe in the corner of the living room, I addressed Katie. “From now on, whenever we’re outside, we need to be armed. If we are working, we always need a lookout. I don’t care if you’re just going out for a second, never leave the house unarmed.” I opened the safe and removed two guns. The first was my Mossberg 930 SPX. Its eight round capacity and semiautomatic action made it an ideal choice for a home defense shotgun. With an eighteen and a half inch barrel, it wasn’t unwieldy, even inside the house. Loaded with two and three-quarter inch shells, its recoil was manageable even for Katie.
She shot a lot of skeet with it and did fine even though the barrel and choke were not designed with skeet shooting in mind. I racked a round into the chamber, double checked the safety, and handed the gun to Katie. “We’re a long way from town and I doubt anything will be out here. Just the same, I w
ant you armed.”
She took the gun from my hands, checked that it was loaded, and slung it over her shoulder.
I loved watching Katie with a gun. She was one of the few women I knew who actually knew what to do with one. On our first date, I took Katie shooting. I thought it would be a good test to see what she was made of. She had never shot before and was excited to give it a try. She didn’t do very well on the first outing, but she enjoyed it. We shot a lot in the months that followed and it showed. Within a short time, she could out shoot most of my buddies. That was saying a lot because most of them were very good shots.
Once I gave Katie her weapon, I returned to the safe to pick one for myself. I didn’t have to think about it. Without hesitation, I reached for my AR-15. It had been a work in progress for two years. I spent nearly six months buying parts before I could assemble it. The initial form was plain but functional. It was very accurate. I saved money and continued to add accessories. Over time it had morphed into the form that currently rested in my safe. I reached into the safe and was rewarded with the familiar textures of metal and plastic blending together to form the sleek weapon. Without looking, my thumb instinctively pushed up on the safety selector. My index and middle fingers wrapped around the charging handle, smoothly pulled it back, and then let it slide home, picking up a bullet from the magazine and driving it into the chamber. I pulled the stock into my shoulder and sighted down the top of the rifle. The red dot inside the Aimpoint optical sight grabbed my eye’s focus as I lined it up on the deer head hanging on the wall ten feet beyond the end of the rifle.
The Aimpoint was the most expensive addition to my gun, but worth every dollar. The increased speed of target acquisition was unbelievable compared to iron sights. Lining up the front and rear sights had gone the way of the eight track player. Whatever the dot touched was going to soak up lead when the trigger was pulled. It was probably the biggest leap in the evolution of tactical shooting since the advent of the machine gun. It gave its possessor the fraction of a second advantage that often decided the outcome of a gun battle or competition.
Satisfied with the condition of the rifle, I picked up three, thirty round magazines from the shelf in the safe and stuffed them in my pockets.
“What about me?” Toby asked. “I want my gun.” Toby had a small .22 single shot rifle.
“Not today, buddy. I’m going to need your help hammering nails. Besides, you don’t have a sling for it.” It was an excuse, nothing more. The real reason I didn’t give it to him was because I didn’t want my eight year old son killing people. He didn’t need to carry that kind of baggage around for the rest of his life. Katie would protect him when I left.
We spent the next two hours hammering plywood over the downstairs windows. I debated cutting slits in the wood through which to shoot. In the end, I decided it was better to have solid wood over the windows. I didn’t want to provide any hand holds to help tear it off. Besides, my bedroom on the second floor had a great field of fire. If it came to shooting from the house, I would go for the higher elevation and better view every time
Once the windows were covered, I went to work inside the house. I knew from experience how easy it is to kick in a door. The doors needed reinforcement, so I rigged up two metal brackets for each entrance, one for either side of each door. The brackets were secured to the studs in the wall with lag bolts. Once in place, they held a two by six across the inside of the door to support the hinges and deadbolt. They would be plenty sturdy and it only took a second to slide the two by six braces through the brackets and across the door, completely securing our fortress if somebody tried to breach it.
Toby looked at the completed improvements and said, “Too bad we don’t have time to make a portcullis, moat, and drawbridge.”
“Too bad,” I said, “but I think this will work fine.”
“I guess this means you are going to leave us again,” Katie said with a touch of bitterness in her voice. She didn’t want me to leave. She regularly complained about having to compete with my job for my time. This time, I sensed the bitterness was not about competing, but fear. She was afraid to be alone and afraid of what may happen to me. The sense of duty that caused me to care for her and Toby was the same sense that drove me to serve the people of Lost Hills. She didn’t like that it was taking me away again, but she understood.
“I have my phone. Call if there are any problems.” I kissed her and turned to the door
“Connor, be careful and stay out of trouble.”
“You know me,” I said, opening the door.
“I do know you and that’s why I feel obliged to tell you to be careful,” she said.
“Keep the shot gun with you, even in the house. As soon as I leave, bar the door.”
I stepped outside and started toward the car. The sun had just set. Clouds on the western horizon were ablaze with hues ranging from orange to pink, which washed into the darkening blue higher above the horizon. Birds in the trees around the house chirped their final conversations of the evening. As a squadron of mosquitoes hummed around me, searching for an unprotected fragment of skin to drill into, I was glad I had tolerated long sleeves during the heat of the day. The impenetrable barrier the sleeves provided in the cool evening was worth the extra sweat they caused in the afternoon.
I quickly pulled the door handle, slid into the seat, and closed the door before the car could fill with mosquitoes. Placing the key in the ignition, I gave a twist forward and released it as the motor purred to life. I pulled down on the gear selector and began my trek back into town, which was where I anticipated I would be needed the most.
I dialed Matt’s number on my cell phone as I traversed the fifteen miles to town. He picked up on the first ring. “Are you okay?” he asked without greeting.
“You aren’t going to believe this. It looks like Katie, Toby and I are all immune to the infection,” I answered.
“That’s the first good news I’ve heard all day. Where are you right now?”
“I’m on my way to town, about five minutes out,” I said.
“Meet me at the station. We have a big problem and I’m not sure how we’re going to deal with it.”
I could tell from his voice that something had shaken him. Matt was as squared away as any deputy I had ever worked with. He had been calm earlier in the day in the midst of everything that was happening. Something else had occurred to take away his normally steely edge. His concern rattled me. My brain subconsciously drove my foot further into the accelerator. When I looked at the speedometer, I was accelerating through ninety. I didn’t slow down until I passed the city limit sign.
Between the city limit sign and the station, I saw five bodies laying in the streets. Only two of them were Asian. The other three were white. I recognized two and the third had taken a large caliber gunshot to the face, anonymizing it.
Approaching the station, I saw Matt’s car parked in front of the building. Without locking the doors to the car, I briskly ascended the five steps to the front door and pushed on the glass door with no effect other than a rattle. I realized the bolt was locked tight. Burrowing into my pants pocket, I withdrew the key. With a snap of my wrist, the bolt clicked open. I entered the office and saw Matt standing on the far side of the reception window facing me.
“We have a problem,” he said. His face was grim and his hair disheveled. He had taken his gas mask off. I could clearly see the early stages of a black eye. A red crust around his nostrils was the last remnant of a bloody nose.
“What happened to you?” I asked. If the situation were different, I would have given him a bad time about taking a licking. In light of everything else going on, it didn’t seem appropriate.
“The Homeland Security contractors aren’t here to investigate.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They are a mop up team. They are here to contain the virus.”
“That sounds like a good thing, right?”
“Their idea of con
tainment is to put a bullet in the head of anyone who has come into contact with the disease,” he said through clenched teeth. “I understand killing people who are sick. The problem is, I saw them kill people who showed no signs of infection. They had been exposed and, apparently, that was enough.”
“Who did they kill?” I asked in disbelief.
“The team showed up at the station an hour and a half ago. They asked for a list of people who had been exposed. I assumed that they were going to gather all the people and move them to one location so they could figure out who was sick. I told them that the incident had started at Mary's and told them who had been there. I also told them there had been an incident at the Knick Knack Shack and at the elementary school.
“They asked where the people from Mary's were since they were probably the furthest along. I led the way to her house. They kicked in the door and rushed the house. I made the mistake of following them inside. Bertha and Mary were both unconscious. Larry was awake, but wasn’t cognizant of what was going on. They shot all three of them. I know they had the disease and it was necessary, but I’ll never get that image out of my head. They were my friends.
“It got worse from there.
“I had already told them that Sara Jones had been working in the Knick Knack Shack when the woman collapsed there. I followed them when they went to her house. They rang the door bell and her dad opened the door. They asked if Sara was home. He told them that she was. He said he had just come home from work to take her to the hospital. They asked if he had been in contact with her. He told them he had just come in from the garage and hadn’t been to her room yet. The contractor shot him in the head, right there on the porch. There was nothing wrong with him. He was as healthy as you and me and hadn’t been exposed to Sara yet.”
It didn’t sound right to me. The government wouldn’t send in a goon squad to kill healthy people. “They wouldn’t shoot him for no reason. What else happened before they shot him?”
