A Matter of Days (4 page)

“Just help me find it.” She bit off the words without looking up.

I scooted over to the counter and wrote the number down on the back of a napkin. “Here.”

“Is this his cell or his home?”

“He doesn’t have a landline, Mom, only a cell.” I spoke quietly, as if trying not to spook a lion. My mother didn’t believe in cell phones, but I think that belief stemmed from the expense, not because she really had anything against them.

“Okay. Thanks.” She huffed out a sigh and wrapped her sweater more tightly over her scrubs. She picked up the phone and said, “Go find your brother and keep him company.”

Clicking on the phone to eavesdrop on Mom and Bean …

“There isn’t much time before we get to flashover. It’s already hitting Asia and Africa. England has a mortality rate exceeding ninety percent.”

“That’s not possible—”

“We’ve never been here. It’s a new world.”

“How long? Weeks?”

“Days.”

“Okay, thank you. I’ve never thanked you for all you’ve done. I’m sorry. For everything.”

“I’ll accept your apology when I see you the next time. Tell Nadia I said happy birthday.…”

Mom argued, “But it’s not close to her birthday—”

I laid the phone down; I couldn’t risk clicking the button. I’d swing back through as quick as I could later and shut it off.

Start the countdown clock. Seven days and read the letter, open the box.…

 … I found Rabbit glued to the television. Watching footage of riots in Hong Kong.

“Jimmy says we should go to church on Sunday.”

“Huh? Why?” I looked for the remote but couldn’t find it. Rab didn’t need to be watching this.

“Because we’re going to die if we don’t ask forgiveness.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“We all die.”

“Eventually. Not now. Besides, what do you have to be sorry for?” I saw the remote clenched in his white knuckles.

“Not going to church. Susan says her parents say this is the end of days. And there’s going to be a revolution.”

“Jesus, who are your classmates? The cult of horrible news?”

“They’re talking about the government doing experiments and—”

“Rabbit?” I knelt down and gently touched his hands. They still gripped the remote. I purposely put my face between his and the screen now showing people in Brasília suffering from an outbreak of bubonic plague. “Look at me?”

He met my gaze, his brow furrowed with panic and worry.

I untangled his fingers from the remote, never breaking eye contact. “We don’t need to go to church. People are sick, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of days or an alien invasion or that there’s going to be a civil war. Okay? Bad stuff happens all the time and we get through it, right? We’re the cockroaches. We’ll get through this, too.…”

 … Rabbit moved the curtain away from the front window and pressed his face against the glass, trying to see the ambulance better. “It’s the crazy cat lady. She’s turning into a Smurf. Blue spots all over her.”

Three emergency responders piled out of their truck all decked out in spacesuits. They moved in slow motion. I couldn’t see well around the ambulance, so I shifted.

“Nadia?” Rab called from the front door.

They loaded cat lady onto a backboard and masked her face to help her breathe.

One of the guys saw me standing there and lifted his helmet to yell at me, “You’ll need to let all the cats out!”

“Why me?” I shouted back.

“Someone needs to or they’ll die too,” he bellowed in reply while moving away. Maybe I misheard. Maybe he didn’t really say “die too”—wouldn’t she get better? Come home? …

Mom showered for almost an hour. “It’s bad, Nadia.” She hung her head as tears fell down her cheeks. “They sent us home tonight. Canceled all shifts for the rest of the week.”

“Who’s taking care of patients?”

“There weren’t enough of us left anyway. Most people were calling in sick to take care of their own families or were ill themselves.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. No one’s seen anything like it. Someone said bird flu, but we had twenty cases of XRD TB in two hours today.”

“XR what?”

“Drug-resistant tuberculosis. Almost everything coming through our doors doesn’t respond to medication, or is secondary to this virus. Nothing works. They’re calling it BluStar because of the blue star-shaped bruises it leaves along the skin.…”

Curfews … Riots … Helicopters dumping flyers of news … No water … No power … The fall of complete silence except for Mom’s screams at the end …

W
e stripped that rest stop of gas and anything remotely useful. We felt like vultures. Rats. Criminals.

At least, I did; Rabbit, not so much. “It’s not stealing. Not anymore.”

Clearly, my brother was more pragmatic. “I know, it’s just that—”

Rabbit imitated Dad’s deep voice. “Be the cockroach, Nadia.”

I punched his arm.

“He was all about surviving.” Rabbit said this toward the window, as if the scenery might reveal new truths.

“At any cost?” I leaned back a little. The second day of driving gave me more confidence behind the wheel.

“For us, yes. Think of it like shopping with an unlimited credit card. We can make it fun.” Rabbit slouched down and slanted a glance my way, as if waiting for my reaction. “We have to.”

“Hmm … shopping with an unlimited budget? That’s a good point.… When did you get so smart?” I asked, knowing he’d gotten the genius genes from Dad.

“You just haven’t paid attention.” Rabbit grinned. He waggled his eyebrows. “Let’s go to the mall. I need new … Airwalks.”

I pretended to think before shouting, “New makeup!”

“Shades!” He pantomimed putting on a pair with boyband panache.

“Unlimited Seven by Seven brand jeans.” As if we could even afford one pair in the real world.

“American Eagle all for me!”

“Gap!” I giggled.

“Nordstrom!” Rabbit cracked up like a little kid. A game of Name That Store made the miles seem shorter.

“Barnes and Noble!”

He shook his head, feigning disappointment. “You’re a dork—going for books. GameLand is so much cooler.”

“I can read books without electricity.” I sobered as reality crashed back in.

“Oh, you just ruined the whole thing.” He snorted and dropped his feet off the dash and onto the pile of survival books and maps.

“We’ll get used to it, won’t we? The no-power thing?” I asked.

“We have a choice? Then, I’ll choose a generator and solar panels and running water and refrigeration and—”

“Bean said Pappi’s got it all figured out,” I announced with more assurance than I felt. I’d learned fast that being an adult sometimes meant projecting an illusion rather than truth. “Bean will know what to do, too.”

“Anyone can, he can,” Rabbit agreed as he pointed out the exit to the next highway.
Through the mountains at the lowest altitude possible
. “We just have to get there, right? Then, it’ll all be fine.” His voice was steely and determined.

“Right.” I hoped. The temperature dipped as we gained altitude up into the foothills of the Cascades, where the wind blew with icy fingers and the rain seemed chunky when it hit the windshield. We didn’t turn on music, and I kept the headlights on even though I wasn’t sure they helped me see better. There were lots of places a car could drop off the side and never be seen.
Not like there is anyone to rescue us. Stop being a pessimist, Nadia
.

We kept going until a fresh blanket of white snow covered everything. I swore.

“I guess no one’s plowing the roads, huh?” Rabbit sat forward in his seat and gazed out at the highway in front of us. The lane markers were gone, but the snow couldn’t have been more than a few inches since the path of the road was visible, if all white.

“What do we do now?” My driving skills were pushed to the limit with rain, and I shuddered at the possibility of sliding off a mountain with my brother in tow.
Survive BluStar. Die in a car accident. Ironic
. I stopped the Jeep on a particularly straight and even stretch. An uncommonly warm spring meant there wasn’t a ton of packed snow. What we didn’t know was what the weather had been like up here for the past months. Could be inches or feet.

“Put the tire chains on?”

“Chains? We have chains? How do you know this stuff?” I questioned.

“They’re under the bench seat. You took care of Mom for those last days, Nadia. I packed up Bean’s stuff and read a ton in all those books. It’s what I could do.” Rabbit sounded older than our parents.

I nodded. I’d simply assumed he’d stayed away from Mom’s bedroom because he was scared, not because he’d been working on getting ready for this trek. “Are there instructions for these chain things?”

“Of course.” He handed me my winter jacket and zipped his own up before plunging into the elements to dig the chains and pamphlet out. His mutters sounded something like “I should have put them near the top, not on the bottom.”

I almost believed he could make this trip without me. It was more comforting than disturbing to think he’d be okay.
Just in case
. We closed the doors to keep out the wind as he handed me the instructions. “These are in Japanese.”

“Flip them over.” Rabbit almost rolled his eyes.

I did, but it wasn’t much better. “That’s Spanish. Fine print is English. Are these stick figures or hieroglyphs?”

Finally, the only thing left to do was try. We followed the instructions, and by the time we finished, I was bathed in sweat. I peeled off my coat and Mom’s cardigan and kept my window down a few inches until it was too cold.

I swallowed, turning on the ignition. “We have to do this.” Silence stretched as we made our way down the middle of the road.

“It’s only like six inches of snow. We can do this. ‘The key
is to drive slowly and at a steady pace. Don’t hit the brakes,’ ” Rabbit read from a travel book’s section on mountain driving.

He craned his head against the window and stared up the mountainside. “What about avalanches?”

I lifted my foot to stamp on the brake but caught myself.
Avalanches? Seriously?
“We’ll have to cross that when we come to them, but no loud music. I don’t really want to get buried until it thaws out.”

“Good news is that we have plenty of food, water, and supplies to, you know, live.”

Terrified of getting us both killed, I tried to lift the serious tension of being. “But you’d start to stink and I couldn’t handle that!”

Rabbit picked it up and ran for a few miles, bantering about farting and belching and all things boy. I was happy to hear him talk about normal stuff, but our ten-miles-an-hour speed had me fretting about gas supplies and hypothermia.

The snow packed down under the car and we finally reached the ski lodge at the summit. We had a long way to go before we were clear of the mountains.

“Nadia, it’s already five. We’re not going to make it down in time. Before dark.”

I turned into the parking lot. “You wanna spend the night up here?”

“Well, I can’t imagine a lot of people were skiing right before they died, so it might be empty.”

Good point
. I drove deeper into the deserted parking lot. At least, I thought it was deserted, but the piles of snow could have hidden cars and trucks and an army of abominable snowmen. Animal tracks littered the snow like we’d missed a party.
“What if we get snowed in?” I asked, thinking aloud. I parked and turned off the Jeep.

Rabbit was already unlatching his door and slipping out into the falling twilight. “We stay a while. Or dig out. I don’t know. They have to have snow shovels around here. Take a deep breath, Nadia. Would that be so bad?”

I followed him, inhaling through both my nose and mouth. And for a split second I had no idea what he was talking about. Then the clean crisp air hit my lungs. No smell. That wasn’t entirely true. Pine and ozone filled my lungs. No death. No rotting flesh. Just air. “Oh my God, I forgot.” This is what the world used to smell like.

Rabbit threw himself down into a snowdrift and made a snow angel. “Let’s see what’s inside. Can I take a bath?” My brother used to fight bath time.

“We’ll both take baths.” I, on the other hand, wanted to shower eight times a day for the next month. We’d melt snow, worst-case scenario, to fill the tubs.

Rabbit nodded. “We need cutters for the locked chains on the doors. We shouldn’t keep breaking the windows of places.”