by Kate Morris
Her eyebrows shot up with surprise, “You did?”
He grinned and nodded. “I would’ve told you sooner. I should have. It was stupid. I didn’t know all this was going to happen. Plus, I just thought you’d reject me instantly. You’re not- you’re not like the other girls, not like the ones I hang out with or used to hang out with.”
“That could win the prize for the understatement of the year,” she remarked with a helpless grin.
“Thank God,” Roman said and ran his fingers through the thick strands of hair at her temple. “I never thought I had a chance, so I just hung back and didn’t do anything about it.”
“Why would I reject you? Don’t you think that’s a little backward? I think you’re confused.”
He shook his head adamantly and replied, “No, I’m not. You’re way out of my league. Look at you. Look at what you have. Look at who you are. Unlike the other kids at school, you know who you are. Everyone else is just tripping through life trying to be like someone else, to one-up each other, but not you.”
“I’m a loser outcast,” she stated loudly. “I’m poor. I work two jobs. I can’t even afford to go to college. My mother’s in prison. I’ve never been anywhere. Well, anywhere nice. I don’t have anything. Are you serious?”
“Don’t say that,” he hissed as if angry. “You may be an outcast, but you aren’t a loser. They’re the losers. Trust me. I’ve hung out with them since I was Connor’s age. They’re all losers.”
“Those are your friends, though. You’re like the most popular guy in school.”
He shrugged. “I can’t stand most of them. They’re nothing like you. You’re so much more interesting. You have a grandmother who loves you, who’s there for you. You have a loyal friend. I barely even know you still, and you’re already way more interesting than any of them. You’re always so full of hope and optimism. I’ve never met anyone like you. And you never complain about anything. I actually want to talk to you. I hate it when you ignore my texts.”
“Sorry,” she whispered and tried to look away. Roman stopped her by putting pressure under her chin with his index finger.
“It’s okay. It would take more than you ignoring me to make me mad at you. I don’t even blame you for ditching my texts. You’re so much more fascinating and lead a more interesting life than me. You don’t have time to deal with me.”
She rolled her eyes at him at this one. “Yeah, right. Being poor isn’t interesting, Roman.”
“No, it’s not that. You’re just different. Your financial status doesn’t make you who you are, Jane. Look at my rich friends with their asshole rich parents. No personalities. Zero. You’re not like that, though. I feel like…like there’s this magnet between us drawing me to you. That sounds stupid, but that’s how I feel.”
She scowled slightly, feeling that same way about him and not nearly as comfortable enough with her feelings to express it. She also didn’t want to get her hopes up too much about Roman. This could be a fleeting infatuation because she was different from him. He could dump her by the weekend.
“And I want to hear what you think about things. I find myself wondering, ‘What would Jane think?’ or ‘How would Jane feel about this’?”
Jane shook her head weakly. “Once this is all over and everything goes back to normal, things will go back to the way they were. You’ll have your friends, and I’ll have…well, I’ll have Dez. It’s just the way it is, Roman. We’re never going to mesh, not really.”
“That’s not true. I’m done. Brian and Aaron already know it. I told them weeks ago. As a matter of fact, the day I told Steph I was taking you to homecoming, I’d just finished talking to Aaron and Brian out by my car about it. I told them I was done. I even told them I was going to ask you to homecoming, which they thought was cool. It just worked out that I happened to be there when Stephanie was harassing you, and I could jump in and say I was taking you to homecoming. It helped me, too. I was nervous as hell to ask you.”
She looked down at her knee between them, “I don’t think I would’ve believed you anyway.”
“I would’ve convinced you, even without the trickery. I didn’t want to hang with that group anymore. My only real friends, Aaron and Brian, were fine with it. Honestly, I think they’re sick of that group of assholes, too.”
“But look at your mom,” she reminded him. “Our social classes are just different.”
“Dammit, Jane,” he cursed, startling her, “There is no such thing as social classes. We aren’t in India. My mother was just being an asshole. If she shunned me for life, I wouldn’t care, either. I want you, not them. You’re everything I hoped you’d be once I got to know you better. And, trust me, there was a lot of thinking and imagining that I’ve done about you for the past two years. Believe me, the imaginary you I’d thought about for so long isn’t even as good the real you.”
“Roman,” Jane inhaled unsurely, moved by his words. She’d been beaten down so badly by the people at school for so long that she had a hard time believing him. Trust was even more difficult, but she did, for some strange and probably insane reason, trust Roman.
He sighed as if he were distressed. Roman gripped the back of her head and pulled her close. Then he leaned his forehead against hers. He seemed upset. “Now…now I just have to keep you safe. That’s all I can do. I can’t even worry about the rest of it for the time being. I just need to keep you safe.”
Movement out of the corner of her eye drew her attention, and Jane pulled back. “Your dad!”
Roman jumped out of the truck and helped his father unload his cart. Jane got out and helped, too.
“They said they’re getting another shipment tomorrow,” Jim said. “If we come back first thing, they’ll have it in there unloaded. I bribed the guy with some money, and he said he’d make sure to save us a pallet full of canned goods and food.”
“Awesome,” Roman said quietly as an ambulance raced by followed by two police cars and a firetruck.
“Let’s go,” his father said and hopped back in the truck.
They sped home, avoided many emergency vehicles and Army trucks that were huge and loud and congesting lanes of traffic. His father must’ve taught Roman to drive. They were both very good drivers, and she was glad she didn’t have to weave in and out of traffic like that.
As his father drove them home, Jane’s mind just kept revisiting the things Roman had said to her. Could that all have been true? He was acting as if he was in love with her or something. That couldn’t be. She had no experience- less than no experience- in that department. The only things she loved were her grandmother and her father, Dez, too. No boy had ever said anything nice to her at school. Surely, he was exaggerating. Had he really watched her from his bedroom window?
When they got back to the house, Roman and his father took them in some of the supplies and even carried them to the basement. Nana Peaches sent them home with four jars of applesauce and a crate of apples in payment. Roman told her he’d come back later to help her at the barn once he was finished at their house, but she assured him she didn’t need his help. Then he left with his father, not before holding and squeezing her hand before walking away.
Nana Peaches made them a lunch of homemade chicken noodle soup, which hit the spot since the temperature was dropping.
“Roy’s bringing a load of firewood today. I ordered double what I normally get,” her grandmother said over lunch.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Jane agreed.
“I’m not sure how long this is going to last, but we need firewood to get through the winter. I ordered enough to see us through. His family hasn’t been hit with this yet, so he was more than happy for the work. He said they’re running short on money because he and his wife both work at the same company, and they were laid off a few weeks ago because they had sixteen workers off sick with the same thing. I guess some companies came to their senses sooner than others.”
Jane’s phone beeped. It was a message f
rom Dez.
“Hey,” she said to her grandmother, “Oh my gosh, Nana Peaches! Brian’s out of his coma. The doctors told his parents he was going to make a full recovery.”
“Thank the Lord,” Nana said, uncharacteristically religious of her.
“He’s going to get released later tonight. Guess they need the hospital beds.”
“That’s an awfully speedy checkout. The boy just woke up.”
“It was so overcrowded when Roman and I went there.”
She nodded with understanding. “You should head to the barn soon. I want you back before dark.”
“It’s only up the road,” Jane told her as she cleaned their dishes in the sink.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jane returned and went to dress in her barn clothes, which weren’t a whole lot different from her everyday clothes.
Her grandmother was storing away the leftover soup when she went back to the kitchen. Jane paused, unsure of how to talk to her grandmother about the topic she wanted to broach with her.
“Spit it out, Jane,” her grandmother said without turning around.
“Um, I just wondered…Nana Peaches, do you like Roman?”
“Sure, Roman Lockwood is a fine boy,” she said kindly. “Despite his mother,” she added not so kindly.
Jane smiled and said, “Yes, she’s not very nice at all.”
“People judge, Jane,” she said. “You know that.”
“Yes,” Jane acknowledged.
Then her grandmother turned to her and sighed, “Just be careful. I don’t want you to get swept off your feet by Roman. Not now. I wouldn’t have wanted it before all this, either. You’re too young. You haven’t even started your life yet.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, afraid that her feelings for him were already becoming too deep. She’d never had a boyfriend before. She knew the people in his clique did a lot of hooking up, also. Surely, he’d expect that from her and soon if he was going to keep calling her his girlfriend.
“Run along, Jane,” she reminded her. “You need to get back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she answered and pecked her grandmother’s cheek quickly.
When she got to the farm, things looked different. There were two trailers full of unloaded square bales, and the drop deck flat-bed was attached to the pickup truck again. The round bales were also not unloaded. She knocked on Mrs. Goddard’s door to her grand old home but didn’t get an answer. Her son Charles was also not around. Jane shook her head and got to work. The horses’ water troughs all needed filled, and she did so. Then she threw them their hay and deposited grain in the rubber troughs in the front pastures. The stalls were all clean, so there was no need to do that. She wondered if Mrs. Goddard’s hay supplier brought another load of hay this morning and dropped his trailer or if they just hadn’t had time to unload it yet. There was no way she could unload all that by herself. Close to two hundred bales were on there. She scribbled a note and left it on the sliding barn door where Mrs. Goddard would see it that stated she’d come over later and help if they needed it. She didn’t want all that hay to get rained on and ruined.
Then she drove back home, got to work in the orchard, and received a text from Roman wanting to know if she was ready to go to the barn. When she texted him back that she’d already gone, he showed up in his black SUV five minutes later at her house. She climbed down the ladder in the apple orchard and greeted him.
“What’s up?” she asked nonchalantly as he strolled with purpose toward her.
“Seriously? ‘What’s up’ is that you went to the barn without me. I told you I’d help.”
“I didn’t need it. Nana Peaches wanted me back before dark.”
“It’s almost dark now,” he told her the obvious.
“Right, so I made it,” she said and handed him her basket full of apples. “We didn’t get to this earlier.”
He sighed with frustration and stood there staring her down. “Jane, don’t go to the barn without me. Wait for me. It might not be safe. What if you run into trouble?”
“Why would I have trouble at the barn? That’s just silly,” she mocked.
He glared. “There’s absolutely no security over there. Anyone could walk off the street into those barns or drive right up the driveway. It’s not that far back from the road.”
He had a point, but Jane wasn’t about to agree with him. Not when he was being annoying and bossy. Plus, she wasn’t going to admit to him that she hadn’t even considered any of those things.
Instead, she told him about the hay delivery and that she couldn’t find Charles or Mrs. Goddard.
“Maybe they went to town to try and get some food supplies and stuff, too,” he said.
She frowned. “I don’t know. She’s kind of a big gardener. She does a lot of canning.”
“Maybe she needed meat or fresh fruit or something.”
She nodded and said quietly, “Maybe.”
“We’ll go back over tomorrow and check on her if it’ll make you feel better. Together.”
She smiled, and he squinted his eyes, attempting to look angry.
“Hey,” she said, trying to change the subject, “I forgot to tell you. I need to run to the pharmacy in the morning. My grandmother’s almost out of her other prescription.”
“Got it,” he said. “We’ll stop there with you after the pick-up downtown again with Dad.”
Roman helped her collect more apples and pushed the cart back to the house for her. Then he carried the bushel basket into the root cellar so that she and Nana didn’t have to do it. She followed him down and organized a few more boxes, placing items on shelves. They were stocked up for a while. She didn’t know what people with three or four or more children were going to do.
“Kids! You better hurry up,” Nana Peaches called from the living room. “It’s about to start!”
Roman rushed out of the cold cellar and shut the door. He found her near the pantry and said, “Are you ready?”
“Yep, just finishing,” she said and placed the last box on the lowest shelf.
Roman rested a hand on the shelf above her head and said, “You guys need better lighting in here. One bulb isn’t much.”
“Rewiring a house is very expensive,” she mentioned and looked up at him.
Roman reached out and touched her cheek, and Jane found herself leaning into it. She hated to disappoint her grandmother, but Jane was already feeling herself losing her senses when it came to Roman Lockwood. Then she thought of him getting sick, and she pulled back. Perhaps Nana Peaches was right. This might not be the best time to form a close attachment to anyone.
“Ready?” she asked and squeezed past him to go upstairs.
Looking around at the survivors, she was left with a feeling of glum despair. Survivor. That word meant so many things now. If people weren’t infected, then one of the infected was sure to kill them. If one of the things didn’t kill them, then exposure, starvation, or dehydration would. The term really only meant temporary survivor, truth be told, anyway. Eventually, everyone would succumb to this in one way or another, either being killed by one of the infected, or by starvation, thirst, exposure, or the sickness itself.
Her feelings of hopelessness were mirrored in the eyes of the people in the temporary shelter. Surviving today only meant that tomorrow they’d still need the same basic essentials: food, water, shelter, fire, weapon. They didn’t have all of those things, and certainly not ever all of them at the same time.
The words revolved and circled in her brain like turkey vultures hovering in the sky inspecting roadkill. Survivor, shelter, despair, temporary, hopelessness, water, succumb, food. None of the words felt like they were any different from the other, not anymore. They were all synonyms for the same thing: Death. Looking around again, she knew they were all living on borrowed time, and the clock wouldn’t stop ticking off the last precious seconds of their lives no matter how hard she willed it.
Chapter Twe
nty
Her grandmother had the television tuned into the special broadcast, and Jane took a seat on the sofa while Peaches sat in her recliner. Roman was too nervous to sit, so he stood behind the sofa.
On the screen came a signal and the image of an official-looking meeting room with a podium, an emblem behind it on the wall that read CDC with a bunch of fine print words below it, and a draped off area beyond that. It looked like a press conference room where the White House Press Secretary usually held their daily briefings.
A man in a white lab coat and wire-framed glasses walked onto the screen and stood behind the podium.
“Good evening, fellow Americans and members of the press corps here in our audience,” he said. “Please, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dr. Bachmann, and I am the lead scientist working in the DHCPP, the Division of High-Consequence Pathology and Pathogens. Later we’ll hear from General Allerton on the military’s role in this crisis we’re all facing.”
He paused and shuffled his notes before starting again, “As most of you know or have heard, we are suffering from a global pandemic that has spread to the United States. It has been labeled as a strain of the influenza virus, but with much more complicated symptoms and, as of yet, unfortunately, no cure. Over eighty countries have reported in and have been affected and thirty-seven states here in the United States. The virus has been named by the CDC and the WHO as RF1. It was somewhat containable as RF1, but unfortunately, it has mutated into what we are now seeing, which is a more deadly and contagious germ called RF2.”
He paused again.
“My team here has been working with the Antibiotic Resistance Lab Network along with the EIS, or Epidemic Intelligence Service. Both departments are also working with members of the WHO to tackle this on a global scale. The EIS has trained scientists who are acting as a boots-on-the-ground task force taking samples, studying, and gathering data. Together we are working around the clock to find a possible vaccination for the RF2 virus. It is a mutated strain of the flu that we first saw spreading in Africa. We have since discovered that it was taken there by an outside source and released experimentally.”
