by E S Richards
Both Vern and Tracy nodded, the only way they had of communicating anymore. Mia couldn’t believe it. She wanted to speak to this doctor; she wanted to hear what he had to say about how everything had happened. She knew the particles in the ash cloud could lacerate someone’s lungs if they breathed in too many and didn’t protect themselves properly; she’d never imagined it could silence a whole town. Vern and Tracy looked weak—perhaps them losing their voices was only just the beginning of things. Surely there was no way their larynxes could be so badly damaged and their lungs spared. Mia shook her head. What kind of a life was it when you were forced to live out your final days in silence? No wonder the town had seemed so eerie and quiet. Its voice had been taken from it.
“I’m so sorry,” Patrick whispered to his friends, hearing both of their voices in his head as he looked at them. Tracy had been the most beautiful singer. Now her songs would never be heard again. It was such a cruel fate. Every day that passed, more devastating effects of the eruption seemed to appear. He could only guess at what happened to Seattle. Was going back there even the right decision anymore? Patrick felt the weight of the world on his shoulders as he looked at his friends and tried to figure out what to do.
“Which number does the doctor live at?” Mia asked, the scientist inside her keen to uncover more answers about how all of this had happened. “I’d like to ask him a couple of questions about all of this, if that’s okay?”
Tracy nodded after a moment, holding up seven fingers on her hands to indicate the number the doctor lived at. Mia thanked her and made her way to the front door, feeling like she ought to give Patrick some time alone with his friends anyway. He caught up with her just before she stepped outside, placing a hand on Mia’s shoulder and whispering in her ear. Mia understood what he said, nodding and giving her friend a brief smile before stepping back out into the street. She needed to speak to the doctor, but first she had to explain things to the rest of their waiting convoy.
“They what?” Jorge exclaimed after hearing the news, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Mia shrugged. “I’m going to speak to a doctor who lives here now. You can come with me if you want.”
“Yeah, great.” Jorge smiled, pleased that Mia had invited him to join her. He was a little upset they hadn’t been in the same car together over the past couple of days, missing her company and the easy conversation.
“What should we do?” Deb asked as she rubbed her hands up and down her arms, a sharp chill in the air as the adults gathered together outside of the cars. “Is Patrick going to stay here?”
“I’m not sure,” Mia replied, uncertain what Patrick was planning on doing now that he’d uncovered this information about his friends. “I guess just stay out here and wait. I’ll try and be quick with the doctor. I just want to get some answers.”
“Okay,” Deb nodded. “Good luck!”
Making her way over to number seven, Mia and Jorge left the rest of the group and set out to get some answers from the doctor. It felt nice to have Jorge back by her side; Mia could always rely on him, and if she was about to say goodbye to Patrick then she hoped Jorge would continue to be a confidant for her.
“Hello?” Mia called out as she rapped her knuckles on the wooden door. “Doctor Reeves? I’ve come from Vern and Tracy’s place. I was wondering if I could speak to you about what’s happened here?”
The sound of footsteps inside filled Mia’s ears and she prepared for the doctor to open the door. She was nervous about what the professional could tell her. Everything thus far had been assumed by Mia to some extent—she knew the initial dangers of the eruption, but her presumptions about how people would be impacted were nothing more than that: presumptions. She had more than just questions about how the people in Tanner had lost their voices. She also wanted answers about how the rest of the world might be affected. She could calculate how far the ash cloud could spread, but only a doctor could really say how it would affect the population. Now that she had a chance to finally get those answers, Mia doubted if she was truly ready to hear them.
Chapter 10
The cheerful mood that Jerry and Linda had been in after breakfast soon faded, the absence of their grandchildren weighing heavily on both of their shoulders. Linda in particular was starting to feel the strain of things even more. Jerry’s cough grew increasingly worse as the day went on, and as the temperature in the farmhouse continued to drop, they both agreed that something had to be done in the meantime about the gaping hole in the side of their home.
“How will it work?” Linda asked, agreeing with their husband that they needed to do something about it but not quite sure exactly what they could cobble together. “I thought we didn’t have any of the right equipment?”
“Well, we don’t really,” Jerry replied through his spluttering coughs. “Still, we must be able to block the hole somehow. There’s gotta be some sort of temporary fix that will stop the house being so cold. I can barely feel my fingers in here.”
Linda brought her cupped hands to her mouth and blew into them in response, her breath almost visible in the air due to how cold it was. “Yeah, maybe,” she nodded, trying to come up with an idea herself. Aside from the temperature, she was also worried how the air in the farmhouse was being affected. Was it just as toxic as it was outside now? They had the door to Riley’s bedroom closed at all times, but it was clearly making the house colder—could it possibly be forcing poisoned air through the house as well? Jerry’s cough had definitely gotten worse since it happened and Linda couldn’t help seeing the correlation between the two.
“Leave it to me.” Jerry smiled at his wife, seeing how worried she was becoming as the day wore on. It was nearly time for lunch and there was still no sign of Chase or Riley. There was no other way of putting it: they should’ve been back now. “I’ll just go upstairs and check on the room.”
Leaving the den before Linda could argue with him, Jerry padded across the hallway to Riley’s old bedroom. The two of them had come upstairs to relax rather than wait on the hard kitchen chairs. Unfortunately, as the den was just over the hall from where the collapse had happened, it was actually a lot cooler upstairs than it was downstairs.
Jerry hoped that his grandchildren were okay as he thought of them both. It did him no good to try and guess what was keeping them at the hardware store for so long, his imagination running wild with possibilities. In the end, Jerry just told himself that they’d gotten a flat tire and it had taken them longer than usual to fix it so they’d spent the night in the truck and would be back soon. He knew it was naïve, but it was also necessary to keep him from losing his sanity.
He’d taught both Chase and Riley how to change a tire several summers ago, just as he had with Brogan and Mia. It was one of the many skills that Jerry believed everyone should have. He wanted his family to be prepared for anything and so, thankfully, there was very little his children and grandchildren couldn’t do.
Riley was the only one in the family who couldn’t fire a gun. Jerry had actually taught Chase earlier that summer, taking him into the very same field where he’d taught both Brogan and Mia when they turned sixteen. It had been an emotional moment for him, bringing back many memories of the same lessons he’d had with Brogan. Jerry didn’t often talk about his son anymore, but he was on his mind a great deal nonetheless.
The way that Chase had handled both the rifle and the handgun had impressed Jerry, reminding him of Brogan a great deal. The way that he stood, the way he held the weapon by his side when he wasn’t using it; both were almost identical to his father’s mannerisms and it warmed Jerry’s heart to see. Brogan had perhaps only fired a gun once or twice since that first lesson, but Jerry was glad he’d taught him either way. He suspected Chase might have already had more of an opportunity to practice his newfound skills and he had no doubt that Mia was still alive and—if she had managed to arm herself—then all her lessons would be flooding
back to her as well.
His daughter was an incredibly strong and independent woman, Jerry was more than aware of that. All the women in his family seemed to be similar in that way: resilient, determined, and incredibly proud. Just as Linda did things her own way and Riley tried to push those boundaries, Mia set her own rules too. Wherever she was, Jerry was certain she was leading the charge, saving lives and forging her way back to them.
“Well, this is something,” Jerry muttered under his breath to himself as he finally opened the door to his granddaughter’s old room and stepped inside, surveying the damage.
Thankfully the rain had slowed over the last day or so, though the constant drizzle was still filling the buckets that covered the floor. Eyeing a couple of them, Jerry saw they needed emptying and replacing, a task for him to do once he’d ascertained whether there was a way to plug the hole in the meantime. Jerry was reluctant to try and fix anything in the way he and Chase thought they had before, despite blocking off the outside world in some sense needing to be done.
There was Riley’s wardrobe that could be pushed against where the window had been—the back of that could block out a large chunk of the wind that rushed into the room and fluttered Jerry’s clothing. The bookcase in the hall could be re-purposed as well—and there was one in the den too. Walking around the room a few paces, Jerry measured everything in his mind and came to the best conclusion he thought possible. They would make a barricade. If they could block the outside in any sense, that should hopefully keep a bit more heat in the house. Then he’d cordon off Riley’s room completely, no one in or out until Chase and Riley returned with the necessary supplies to fix the roof. Jerry hoped that would be soon.
“Oh dear,” Linda’s voice suddenly piped up behind Jerry, his wife having opened the door and snuck into the room behind him while he was absorbed by his planning. “What do you think we can do?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks, I don’t think,” Jerry tried to reassure her. “I think the best course of action is patching the hole. We can move the wardrobe and a few bookcases in here to cover it. That should help keep things slightly warmer for the time being.”
Linda sighed and nodded. “Okay.”
“Chin up, darling,” Jerry said softly to his wife. “They’ll be back soon. Then we’ll get all of this fixed up and life will go back to normal. Just you wait.”
“I hope so,” Linda sniffed, trying her hardest not to break down in tears. “What’s first, then?” she asked, trying to keep her mind focused on other things. As she’d always found in life, heartbreak was easier to deal with if you kept yourself busy. During all the worst periods of her life she had to remain focused on something else or she would truly break down. Things were too fragile in the farmhouse for her to allow herself to do that again.
“These buckets for one,” Jerry pointed out to his wife with a smile. “We need to empty them before they overflow.”
“Empty the buckets,” Linda repeated with a nod. “Easy.”
Working side by side with his wife, Jerry couldn’t help but reminisce about how things used to be. His mind floated back to the old milking station some forty or fifty years ago. Just after he and Linda had gotten married and he’d inherited the farm from his father, they moved there as a young couple ready to take on the world. The first few months had just been the two of them. The farm wasn’t really in working condition from his father before him, so Jerry had to rebuild the place from the ground up.
He had such fond memories from those early days. Just a small handful of cows that he and Linda would milk by hand, dragging the pails out to the van to be pasteurized off-site. Things hadn’t stayed like that for very long, of course—the money came in and quickly allowed Jerry to upgrade his equipment and hire other people to do the harder work for him. His farm had blossomed like nothing else, growing to hold close to five hundred cattle and nearly a hundred employees. It was sad, in a way, that all that was left now were Milk and Shake in the old barn. The family business had been overrun by newer technology and faster-paced companies.
The memories remained and as Jerry worked side by side with his wife, he couldn’t help but smile. He knew that if one looked hard enough, happiness could be found in any moment. No matter how terrible things might seem, if one had the people who were most important by your side, things couldn’t be that bad.
“Okay,” he smiled at Linda, the buckets all emptied into the upstairs shower drain and repositioned below the hole. “Closet next.”
“We should take the clothes out,” Linda remarked as she opened the doors and ran her fingers along Riley’s summer clothes. “I don’t want them to get water-damaged.”
“Good idea.” Jerry beamed at his wife, standing upright again from where he had taken a short break on the floor. His chest felt quite heavy from lifting all the heavy buckets of water and pacing between the bedroom and bathroom several times. He was out of breath. His throat tickled him and his mouth felt incredibly dry. “I might just get a quick drink first,” he stuttered, a sudden wave of dizziness overpowering him as he stood. “I feel a little…”
Linda sprang forward, catching her husband under the arms as his body fell forward, Jerry losing consciousness in her arms. She wasn’t strong enough to support his weight, not with her bad knee, and the two of them crumpled to the ground. Jerry woke up again immediately, his whole body shaking as he coughed violently on top of Linda, all while the old woman struggled to move her husband’s body off of her.
“Jerry.” She squirmed, finally shuffling free of him. “Are you okay?”
“My head,” Jerry muttered. “I feel faint.”
“Where’s this come from?” Linda worried, crawling a few feet across the floor and grabbing a bottle of water that she’d left by the door. “You were fine just a minute ago,” she added as she handed her husband the water.
“I know,” Jerry sighed as he leaned back against the closet door and took a few long sips from the bottle. “I don’t know what came over me. I feel—” More coughs finished Jerry’s sentence for him, a choking feeling filling his lungs as he struggled to inhale. Every gasp he took felt dirty and he coughed straight back out, his breathing becoming more and more desperate.
Linda watched her husband as he struggled to breathe, his face growing redder and redder by the second. She didn’t know what to do, panic spreading through her body. The bottle of water fell from her husband’s hand, spilling onto the carpet as he lost the ability to grasp it. His whole body seemed to heave up and down as he tried to bring air into his lungs, each mouthful rejected in a violent flurry of coughs. Spittle flew out of his mouth, landing on Linda’s face and neck as she grabbed her husband by the shoulders and tried to calm him, the coughing fit not letting up as Jerry fought to breathe.
“Jerry!” She cried out, her voice breaking and reaching a shrill tone of fear. “Jerry, stop this! Please! Please, stop!”
Looking at her husband, Linda could see that he could hear her. She could see that he understood what she was saying and that he was trying to come back to her, but as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t stop the fit he was seized by. There was something in his lungs that his body was trying to expel, even if it hurt him even more.
Jerry didn’t have any air left in his lungs. He closed his eyes and saw darkness and, in a moment of weakness, he succumbed to it.
Chapter 11
Sitting across from his friends, Patrick couldn’t believe what had happened. Since Mia left, he, Vern, and Tracy had moved into the living room, but none of them had said a word. Vern and Tracy sat on the couch, their hands in each other’s while Patrick perched on the large armchair across from them, trying to figure out what to say. The pressure was all on him. For the one person in the room who still had the ability to speak, he had no idea what to say.
“How long ago did this happen?” Patrick eventually asked, coming up with a question that he knew they could answer without words. Vern held up two fingers. Two days. For two da
ys his friends had been unable to speak, forced to wait for their final day to arrive. Patrick thought back to where he’d been two days ago and remembered the farmhouse they had stayed in. The two bodies they’d found dead at the kitchen table. It was too close to home—Mia had told him the similarities between the farmhouse and where she had been brought up and now, he saw the similarities between the dead couple and his friends. He hoped Vern and Tracy would be able to survive, but the odds didn’t appear to be in their favor.
“How?” Patrick asked, though he knew it was a question they wouldn’t be able to answer easily. He just couldn’t control his words. His emotions were running too high. “How could this have happened? I don’t understand.”
Letting his body keel over, Patrick dropped his head into his hands and rocked his body slightly. Ever since that day in the airport when he’d lost Harriet and Tilly, he hadn’t been able to grieve. A selfish part of him had been hoping that once they arrived in Tanner, he could take that moment. Vern and Tracy were some of his oldest friends—Vern in particular—and Patrick had been hoping for a moment of safety and security in their home. Now that he was there, he felt the complete opposite. He had already lost his wife and a daughter; now he felt like he’d lost his friends as well.
Feeling an added weight on the arm of the chair, Patrick tilted his head to one side to see Tracy perched there, a piece of paper held in her hand. He sniffed and looked up at her, an understanding smile on her face. Straightening up again, Patrick looked over at Vern and watched as his friend nodded at him, indicating for Patrick to take the piece of paper. When he read what was written, he felt himself threatening to break down even more. Three words in Tracy’s delicate handwriting: Talk to us.
Patrick sensed tears prick at his eyes. Despite everything—despite the terrible things that had happened to their own bodies and the things the pair of them must have endured—Vern and Tracy were still there for him. They wanted him to be okay and more than anything, they were able to listen.
