He kneed me in the balls and pushed me into the mud. But then I got the satisfaction of telling everyone his knees touched gay balls—through two layers of clothes, and everyone knows the gay spreads evenfasterthrough natural fabrics.
“Okay,” Jamie finally says, shaking me from my thoughts. He stands and leans the crutch against the wall. “So, about your leg.”
“We should just cut it off, right?”
He gives a lopsided grin and takes the notebook his mother wrote for him and flips through it. “We could try something less drastic first?”
Jamie holds out the open book and I take it. There’s a horrible drawing of a person with a bent arm—Jamison’s mom wasnotan artist—and the acronym RICE next to it. Rest, ice, compression, elevation.
I gasp. “Rest, Jamie? Seems a little extreme, doesn’t it?” But it sounds amazing. Rest. I feel like I haven’t rested since...
Jamie nods. “You’re right, I’ll go get the hacksaw.”
I give him a polite chuckle and start flipping through the notebook. At the front are several journal entries from early last June. That was when everyone kept saying, “It’s just a summer flu! People die from the flu all the time!” Apparently, Jamison’s mom knew something was up. At the end of one entry on June 29, underlined in her barely legible handwriting, it says:107 dead in one day!
I assume that’s just at her hospital. Because by August they weren’table to keep up with the number of dead. By the time the internet went down, there were estimates that almost 178 million people were dead in the US alone. Over half the country. Less than seven months from the first reports of mass bird deaths in Croatia, Nepal, and Guyana in mid-May to the bug wiping out any semblance of civilization in November.
Who knew it would take longer to gestate a tiny human than to destroy the world?
I flip through farther, the entries getting increasingly worse before they end abruptly in August. After that it’s just medical texts and notes addressed to Jamie. There’s a table of calculations for medicine, giving the correct dosage per pound; diagrams of splints for arms, legs, fingers, and toes. I come to a stop in the last quarter of the book. Brown speckles litter the pages and some of the handwriting is smeared with it.
Blood.
Jamison’s mom was still writing when the bug got her. I flip a few more pages and the blood spatters get larger. The handwriting gets more difficult to read. Then the pages go abruptly blank.
“This is pretty incredible,” I say, flipping back to a less morbid page—small diagrams of an appendectomy? Christ, Dr. Jamison’s mom had a lot of faith in her boy, didn’t she?
“I wish my parents were doctors. My dad didn’t leaveany‘accounting for the end of the world’ books behind and all my mother left me was a sense of humor.”
I try to smile, to show off that sense of humor, as I hand the book back to Jamie.
“I think your leg might be broken, which would make sense, itbeing caught in a bear trap and everything. But we can’t exactly be sure without an X-ray, which my mom did not take from the hospital.”
“Very shortsighted on her part, if I may say.”
Jamie holds a hand out to me. “Here, we should do this on the floor.”
I bite back another innuendo—See? Wasted—and let him help me off the couch. This time his hands are cold and mine are warm.
He helps me over to the floor, where, less than twenty-four hours ago, I sat down and decided to let him shoot me. Insert Paul-Rudd-Look-at-Us GIF.
Oh man, I hope Paul Rudd survived the bug.
There’s a pile of clean clothes and a large bowl of soapy water on the floor next to a small pile of bandages. At my look, Jamie blushes.
“Right, so since you didn’t get to shower last night, I thought you might want to wash up before we wrap your leg. Also, that’s probably how you’ll need to clean yourself for the next few weeks until you can put weight on it.”
I groan. “That’s right, you have a hot water heater.” The idea of a shower sounds delightful right now.
He motions to the bowl. “I guess this is the next best thing? Anyway, I’ll wait outside for you. Just call out when you’re finished.”
After he leaves me—taking the tub of supplies back out to the shed with him—I take way too long to undress, and by the time I do, the soapy water is cool. I work quickly, scrubbing away at my skin until the water is cloudy and I smell less like an apocalyptic dumpster. Then I pull on the clothes Jamie set out and call him.
He returns and takes my dirty clothes and the bowl into thekitchen. When he gets back he crouches next to me and asks me to lift my leg up. I do as he says and he pulls the leg of the sweatpants up to my knee.
“Okay, you can lower it again.” His eyes are on the stitch job he did last night. My leg is still swollen. He places a gentle hand on my knee and warmth explodes across my body. My cheeks burn and I swallow hard.
He’s the first person who’s touched me in... I have no idea how long. The bug ruined hugging and all touching in general. This feels so... not weird but... wrong. And also right.
