The Seventh Day (2 page)

Trembling and in shock, we crawl from the
vehicle. Mom doesn’t move though. She sits, frozen like she has had a mental
breakdown. I slap her window, making her jump, and she turns toward me slowly.
Black tears leave her eyes, dragging makeup to her cheeks. Her lips quiver. I
don’t understand why she's being so dramatic in front of Joey. Seeing Mom cry
makes Joey cry. "Mommy! Mommy, get out of the car!"

“She needs a minute.” I sigh, pulling my
sister into the house, almost locking the garage door and leaving Mom in there
with whatever is on the window. It’s a cruel thought but she’s acting insane.
The whole thing was scary, but maybe not as scary as she’s making it seem.

The first thing I do is check the locks,
then get the phone. I am just about to dial 9-1-1 again when the phone rings.
The number is blocked, making me wonder if it’s the school calling to cancel
for the day.

“Hello?” I answer as I lock the backdoor to
the yard. The phone is fuzzy, answering the question of
who
it is before the voice does. The radiophones take a second to click in. “Dad!
You there?
Can you hear me yet?”

"Lou? Jesus, I’ve been trying to reach
you guys for half an hour. Why wasn’t your mom answering her phone?" My
dad sounds funny.

"Uhm, something
happened—something really weird. And now Mom's lost it." My heart
starts to pound as I realize what I'm about to say. “There was a man covered in
blood at the school and a kid maybe, behind the dumpster—”

“No!” He cuts me off. “Oh my God, it’s
there? Did you see anyone biting—?” He pauses for a moment. "Put her
on. Put your mother on now!"

I open my mouth to tell him the story, but
I hear something in his voice—an urgency and tone I rarely hear. I open
the garage door to find Mom frantically bleaching the SUV. The fumes burn my
eyes. “Uhhhh, she’s cleaning the blood—” I mutter, squinting through the
smell of it.

“NOW!”

I jump, holding the phone out. "Mom,
stop! It's Dad."

She turns. The black tears are still
streaming. "Did you see the child, Lou? D-d-did, did you see the feet by
the dumpster? They twitched—did you see it? I think that bastard attacked
her. I think he hurt her." Her sobbing is out of control. “That could have
been Joey. I could have left her there.”

Hesitantly, I hold the phone back up to my
ear, wincing. "Dad, just a—"

"PUT HER ON THE GODDAMNED PHONE,
LOU!" he screams into my ear for the first time ever. It makes my stomach
ache to hear him panic—he’s the rock.

Closing my eyes, I hold the phone out for
her. "YOU HAVE TO TAKE THIS!" My hand is trembling and my heart hurts
a little. First the crazy man at the school and now my father is panicking.
My father who has never yelled at me before—ever.

I blink a single tear as Mom drops the rag
she is scrubbing with into the trashcan and pours bleach onto our SUV. It’s
like she doesn't hear me. She’s stuck on the man and the blood. The floor is
flooded with bleach. She pours it on her hands and walks to the utility sink.
There she scrubs like she is Lady Macbeth. Her eyes are wild with smeared
makeup and something I have never seen before, maybe a loss of control. I can
hear my father screaming from the phone I am holding out to her but she is in a
trance. "MOM!"

She turns, suddenly realizing what is
happening. "Hold-hold it up to my ear."

I can honestly say I have never met the
woman in front of me. My ball-busting lawyer of a hateful mother is gone and in
her place is a simpering, feeble, scared woman. She is weak and frightened. I
hold the phone up to the side of her face. I can smell her perfume, but it
mixes with the bleach and nauseates me.

Her lips quiver. "Baby, there was a
man and a child and the child was hurt badly, and the poor thing’s feet
twitched and there was no one. No one was there. I almost let Joey go
in—" She sobs, shaking. “I was on the phone and I didn't see. I
didn't see. I should have seen.”

I hear him bark and she stops nattering on.
She
nods,
making noises I assume mean she understands
what he is saying. She sniffles. "I need you now! I can’t do this. I need
you. I can’t do this."

He barks again. She shakes her head as
fresh tears fill her eyes. I don’t know what to do to make her stop being
crazy—to make her get control of herself. I hear something outside of the
garage banging, and something else. I look back at the garage
door
as the noises get louder.

Oh God,
is it the man? Did he follow us home?

Her eyes dart wild and crazed-like to the
sounds, like she too thinks the man is on the other side. She backs away,
bringing the phone and I follow. She shakes her head. "I can't, Steve. I
can't do it. Your children need you." Her eyes are crazy and her mouth is
a tight line. She gives me a look. "He wants to talk to you."

I take the phone back, uncertain of what he
wants me to do, beyond maybe call the police. "We never called the cops
yet—we couldn't get through. It was busy and then there was just a
recorded message."

"Listen to me, Lou. I have
minutes—seconds even.” He’s calm again. He sounds like himself. “The
whole thing is going to be widespread in hours. You have about thirty minutes
before this goes televised and then the world will be in a panic. Right now they
have been jamming signals, in hopes of stopping the panic. But it’s a Band-Aid
situation. Get to the store. Get as much as you can. Be smart—water,
batteries, canned food, and dried food. Forget fresh and forget things that
need a ton of work. Drag the camping barbecue inside. Fill the tubs with water
and the sinks. Get hand sanitizer and bleach. I'm texting all of this to you
right now. When you get back from the store, stay in the house, and board up
the windows. There is plywood in the backyard. I bought a ton when I was home,
for the shed. I want you to get my hammer and my nails and board up the
windows. Do the main floor and the windows near the
garage.
The back of the house isn’t that big of a deal. Touch no one and stay away from
people. Bring Furgus inside—don't let him outside at all. Let him go to
the bathroom in the garage if he gets desperate."

My mouth is dry so when I speak, it sounds
funny. "Dad, Dad, I don’t—I don’t know what you mean. Why would Gus
use the garage as the bathroom?"

"We don’t know for sure what it is,
but hear my voice—I am coming for you. Talk to no one and touch no one.
Right now the guess is that it’s viral."

My heartbeat is so high I feel like I might
pass out. My mom has stripped naked, leaving her clothes on the floor. She
walks into the house, leaving me in the garage.

"Lou?"

I blink, realizing he is still talking.
"Where are you, Dad?"

"Russia but I'm coming home tonight.
I'll call you in a bit. Do the things I texted you. I am coming for you."

I nod. "Okay."

"Don’t talk to anyone. No one. Anyone
could have this thing, Lou. Anyone."

"Okay." I don’t know what I'm
agreeing to or what I'm saying or what he's saying. I just nod, I can’t think.
My brain is so full of blood it feels like it might burst.

"I love you, Lou. Give Joey a kiss for
me and tell her to be strong. Keep your mom in line, kid."
Keep Mom in line?
He always tells me to
cut her slack. “We both know you’re the strong one. You have to be strong,
okay? Be the girl I know you are until I can get there.”

I swallow hard as the phone disconnects,
leaving me to feel more alone than I ever have. I walk inside, noticing that
the stinging in my eyes starts to dissipate when I get into the kitchen, where
Mom is washing her hands again. Joey walks to me, holding the remote. “The
channels aren’t working.”

I press the other button and turn on Apple
TV so she can watch Netflix. The moment her show about the Australian mermaids
starts, our house looks normal, except of course for the fact that my mom is
still naked.

"I have to go to the store, for
Dad."

She spins around. "NO!" Her face
is the most frightening thing I have ever seen, apart from the bloody man.

"I have to."

She looks like she might freak
out—worse than she already is. I'm scared I might. I give her my best
attempt at a smile. "He said we need to get some things and I won’t go
anywhere that's heavily populated. It’s just the store out here."

She gives me a look like she might argue,
but I nod toward Joey. My sister is oblivious to my mother's nakedness,
sobbing, and cleaning. Joey’s lost in her show. Mom's eyes dart between the two
of us and finally she nods. "Hurry."

"I will. I can use the Visa you gave
me."

She shakes her head. "I have cash
upstairs."

I hurry up the stairs, going up before her
so I don’t have to follow her naked body up. "What did Dad tell you?"

“That maybe the man at the school could be
one of what the CDC is calling the infected. They think they have a form of mad
cow disease, but for humans. The people are violent and sick, beyond the help
of doctors.” She shakes her head. "Something about it being a virus, they
aren’t positive though. Not that it matters—people are getting really
sick, whatever it is. He said until they have answers, to stay inside. It's bad
in the big cities. The blood is infectious so you can’t touch it or let them
touch you.” She pauses, staring at herself. Her next sentence is softer, almost
as if she doesn't believe what she’s saying. “He said they bite. The sick
people bite the other people."

A shiver trickles through me, tugging at
every nerve. I don't know what she means by they bite. I understand the
sentence—it’s fairly simple, and yet my head can’t seem to wrap around
it.
They bite?

She pulls on some yoga pants and a tee
shirt, staring at her reflection in the large mirror in the corner. "I
swear
,
I can feel his blood on me."

My blood is ice, I’m certain of it. I nod,
still trying to be brave but inside I’m rocking the way Joey does. "I'll
just go to the store out here." Her dark hair is still in a fancy bun and
her dark-blue eyes look almost brown with the black makeup everywhere. She’s a
mess. I point at the mirror. "You should wash up before Joey sees you like
that."

She lifts her gaze to her face, wincing and
snapping out of the weird confusion she seems to be stuck in. "Oh
God." She hands me a wad of cash and heads for the bathroom. "Be
fast."

I’m almost excited to see her back to being
closed off and bossy. I turn and run down the stairs, locking the door to the
house when I get into the garage. I start the SUV exactly the opposite of how
my dad taught me to drive, opening the huge garage door after the vehicle is
started. As I press the button, I have visions of every horror movie I have
ever seen, but as the door opens, there is nothing beyond my neighbor’s garden.
I back up, closing the door and looking around the neighborhood, seeing people
getting into their cars.
People are still
leaving for work?
Hopefully someone has barricaded the school.

I leave my street and pull onto the main
road. The traffic seems thick but it's going the wrong way. I am driving
against it. Everyone is going toward the city.

Did
no one call the police about the man and the child behind the dumpster?

When I pull into the grocery store I only
find a couple cars, clearly no one realizes what’s happening yet. They don’t
have a dad who is a military scientist.

I run inside, grabbing two shopping carts and
push them side-by-side, running down the aisles and filling them up. When the
first one is full, I leave it at the checkout. “I’ll be back for this in a
minute.” I nod at the lady, showing her my shopping cart full of stuff. She
smiles, almost ignoring me.

I run to the canned-goods aisle and hold
the cart next to the shelf, dragging my arm across the shelves. I look down at
my phone to make sure I’ve gotten everything. When I look up, a lady in a
business suit gives my shopping cart a weird look.

I push the cart to the checkout. The lady
who smiled moments before, now gives me a hateful face and sighs before we
start the process of ringing it all in. Her face is smug when she says,
"$1,304 please."

I pass her $1,320. She starts counting,
again with a sigh.

As she passes me the receipt, I look back
at the people behind me. They all have savage looks on their faces. She is the
only checkout open and each of them
have
a handful of
things. I push the first shopping cart out to the SUV as a young man pushes the
other one for me. “What’s the deal? You stocking up for the apocalypse?”

“Maybe.” I give him a subtle nod. “When you
finish filling my car, go home and lock the doors.”

He gives me a look and then my food.
“You’re Lou, right? The lacrosse star?”

“I’m Lou.” I don't know about being the
star of the team. That's more like Sasha. I nod again. “Anyway, my dad works
for the military. Go home. Don’t stay here. Trust me.”

When the first shopping cart is empty, he
leaves with it, shaking his head. I don't have time to worry about him and
finish filling the entire back with food, water, and batteries from the second
cart. Even with the seats down it is a massive load of stuff. As I leave the
parking lot, I notice the cars starting to stream in. The traffic has reversed
in the hour I have been here. I have to wait for the light before I can get
into the left lane and drive home. The roads are full of people hurrying to the
places they’re going. A woman in a business suit runs down the road, dragging a
child with her. I have no reason to, but I panic anyway. My breathing grows
rapid as my throat feels like it’s thickened.