I straighten my leg out in front of me and set the heel on the floor. The pain increases a touch, but it’s bearable.
I put a little more weight down. A little more pain.
A little more weight... and... not a little more pain. That’s good, right?
I put the rest of my weight down and make the second biggest mistake of my life.
Jamison
AS SOON AS ANDREW SCREAMS, IT’S LIKEtime means nothing again. When he burst in, I flinched and almost shot him right there. But I couldn’t. My finger wouldn’t move. It was right on the trigger but it was like my hand was numb. Even when he told me he wasn’t leaving and I’d have to kill him, I couldn’t. Just like the deer I could never shoot when my mom tried to show me how to hunt. Like the animal traps that sit in the garage, unused. And it’s like the purple face of my mother. The burst blood vessels in her horrified eyes and the raspy breath. The sick and the smell and...
Andrew is screaming in agony on the floor. Maybe I did something wrong. He could be allergic to the antibiotics or the local anesthetic and he’s having a cardiac episode... or whatever happens when people are allergic to those things. That’s not in my mom’s notebook.
Oh God. I just killed someone.
Or it could be a trick. He could be faking it, calling out to whoever is outside waiting for him. Waiting to take this place from us.
No, from me.
Because I’m all that’s left.
But this doesn’t sound like a trick. He sounds like he’s in pure agony. I drop down to the floor next to him.
“What hurts?” I shout over him. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
Tears stream down his red face. He’s pulled his leg up, holding it by his thigh. There’s no more blood on his wounds but... oh no. I move around his leg and put my hands on his knee. He flinches and grabs one of my wrists, managing to grunt out, “No, don’t!”
“Okay, okay.” I put my hands up. “But let’s try to get you on the couch. Just hold your leg out straight and don’t let it hit anything.”
He does as I say and I slip my arms under his to lift him up. The smell of dirt, sweat, and body odor stab at my nostrils. I manage to carry him to the couch in the living room, and he lowers his right leg carefully, letting out several quick breaths.
“You okay?” I ask, but it sounds stupid. Of course he’s not.
He opens his eyes and gives a fake smile. “Stunning.” Though he still looks like he’s in pain, he’s making jokes again. That’s gotta be good.
I dart back to the dining room to grab my mom’s notebook. The pages look like nonsense because my mind won’t quiet itself. I can’t do this. It’s all way too much.
“What is that?” Andrew’s voice snaps me from my thoughts.
“A book.”
He sounds fascinated. “Oh! We don’t have these... what do you call them? Boops? Up north.”
I give him a frown because there’s no way I’m letting him have a smile off that awful joke.
“Right,” he says. “I’m the one with the busted leg. ’Kay, I’ll shut up now.”
“It’s a notebook. My mom was a doctor and this is the notebook she started writing after everything... When things got bad.”
“She wrote it for you,” he says. His eyes are focused on me and they look sad. Because he knows that she wrote it thinking she wouldn’t survive the superflu. Which she was right about.
“Yes.” I bring my attention back to the book. “When it got bad in the city, when the hospital became overwhelmed and the shipments of medicine stopped and they realized no one was surviving the flu, she started grabbing supplies. Everyone did... the doctors, nurses, custodial staff. And it wasn’t long before...”
I trail off because he knows what happened. The refrigerated trucks for the bodies, the mass unmarked graves that couldn’t be dug or filled fast enough. And no one in power doing anything to help or stop it. They just kept trying to force everyone to go about life as usual. To get back to the idea of normal.
It was as if no one learned anything from the other viruses that came before. Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, Ebola, HIV and AIDS, swine flu, and more recently COVID. All the diseases the news used to compare this virus to whennothingwas like this. They thought civilization would be fine because it was before. The world gave us warnings but they went unheeded. At the cost of everything.
Here, we didn’t even try a mandatory quarantine like the Netherlands or a lockdown like in France and Spain. Everyone was full-on Live Free or Die in America. And so they did.
