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Of course there was also no reason to think it
wasn’t
the nodding virus. It was out there, and it was still spreading. He glanced at his dad, but he seemed like he’d already forgotten the accident.
• • • •
That evening, back at home, Joh
He turned on the TV in his room, the screen taking forever to warm from black to an image of the CNN newsroom, where a blonde news anchor was talking beside a virtual map of the United States. There were at least fifty red dots glowing on the map. Most were in Florida, but a few ran up the coast, a few were out west, and there was a cluster nowhere near the rest, in Pe
He turned the sound up until it was blaring, watched images of soldiers jumping from the backs of camouflage brown trucks, setting up roadblocks. Pulse pounding in his hands and feet, his tongue and his balls, he heard the word “quarantine,” but had trouble understanding most of what came from the news anchor’s red lips. Her words couldn’t compete with the terror trumpeting in Joh
A bang on the front door made him jump. Joh
Dad was up, looking bewildered.
“What’s going on?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know.”
It was Kelly Cramer from across the street—Leon and Patty’s daughter—who’d dropped out of community college and moved back home. Her breath was coming in big, frantic gasps. “My folks. I think—” She let the thought go. “Help me.”
Joh
This is not good
.
Leon and Patty were in bed, the blanket pulled up to their necks. Both were nodding, their chins rising and falling. Beneath the blanket their toes were trembling. Leon was making a choking, strangled sound.
The worst thing was their eyes. They were clear and focused, moist with fear, following Joh
Joh
“They said they can’t do anything. There are too many. The hospital in Framington is full, and they can’t move anyone out of the quarantined zone.”
It couldn’t be.
It could, though; of course it could. Wilkes-Barre was barely forty miles away.
“We need to get out of this room,” Joh
“
Help them
,” Kelly said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
Joh
Right now
.” He took off down the stairs and outside, his loose sneakers slapping his heels, adrenaline pushing him to run faster.
When he reached his door and turned, Kelly was on her front lawn.
“I can’t just leave them. What do I do?”
“It doesn’t help them if we get it, too,” Joh
“Do you have any family nearby?” he called.
She pulled out her phone, hit a key and held it to her ear.
Joh
Finally, she let her hand drop. “No answer.”
“Fill up your bathtub,” someone called.
Joh
“The radio said the power’s bound to go out, so to fill your bathtub,” Mrs. Mackery repeated.
Headlights appeared down the street, accompanied by a rumbling. An open-bed military truck came around the corner, soldiers in yellow hazmat suits riding in the back. Kelly ran to the edge of her lawn, waving frantically, both hands over her head, screaming at the top of her lungs for them to stop.
They blew right past. They barely looked at her.
Behind him, Joh
“Dad. Hang on.” He jogged up the lawn, got his father turned around and led him back inside.
A few doors down a minivan was backing out of the Rosso’s driveway.
“Look,” Joh
Joh
He passed Dad, who was peering out the back door, into the yard, his bottom lip working soundlessly. He’d stare out at the aluminum shed and the discarded tires for an hour if Joh
As if the solution to all his problems, the answer to the secrets of the universe, could be found in there, if only he looked hard enough.
Sometimes Joh
• • • •
By sunup there were twice as many dots on the CNN map. No one was allowed out of the infected areas.
“I’m sick of the news,” Dad said, still in his Goodyear work clothes, the pants on backwards. Joh
“Put on something good,” Dad persisted. “I want to watch
The Rockford Files
.”
Jesus, Joh
The Rockford Files
. He must have been five when it went off the air. He turned off the TV. “Come on Dad, we have to go to the grocery store.” They needed more food; there was almost nothing in the house.
As soon as he hit the driveway, Kelly Cramer was out of her house, ru
Joh
“I’m scared.”
Scared of what
, he wanted to ask. This was Ravine, not Philadelphia. There weren’t going to be looters and gangs ru
Kelly stopped a few paces short of them, folded her arms. “If you were going to get it, you’d probably have it already. It takes seven days for the symptoms to show up, so all the people getting sick now were exposed a week ago.”
Joh
Kelly was waiting, her eyes pleading with him.
Christ, when had he become such a dick? He’d known Kelly since she was a baby, and he was, what, sixteen? He’d seen her at a hundred neighborhood barbecues, almost hit her backing out of his driveway about twenty times. They’d never been anything like friends, probably because of the age difference. She’d been kind of a rebel back in high school—shaved head, shredded jeans, cigarettes. There was no sign of that side of her now—she was wearing cut-off denim shorts over purple leggings, her hair in a ponytail.