A Matter of Days (11 page)

“I want to read the letter. Is it in the Jeep?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I do. You promised.” Rabbit’s expression closed and for a moment I saw Dad’s face in his.

He’s right
. I had promised we’d be partners in this journey. That I wouldn’t be his mom. “Okay.” I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out Dad’s music player.

“Does Mom know you took that from Dad’s stuff?” Rabbit slapped his hand over his mouth. He looked near tears. Like for a moment he’d forgotten Mom was dead and she might get mad at me.

“No, but it doesn’t matter now.”

Rabbit reached over to his boots and pulled out a trinket he handed to me. Gold wings sprouted from a parachute.

“This is Dad’s.”

He nodded. “I thought the wings and all, you know … heaven.”

I remembered the day Dad got this pinned on. He went from being a marine to being special forces. He spent hours polishing his uniform’s buttons and pressing the creases exactly right. He was so proud.

I handed it back to Rab. “It’s okay. Whatever it takes for us to get through this, right?” I slid the player out of its holder so I could reach underneath, where I’d tucked Bean’s folded letter. I’d read it so often that I had it memorized. With only the slightest hesitation I handed it to Rabbit.

Dearest Nadia
,

If you’re reading this, then the worst is happening. The shot I gave you, your brother, and your mother is an experimental
injection that I’ve worked on for the past ten years. If your mother is still alive she’ll want to know it’s based on research started during the Cold War. I work in biological weapons programs so highly classified that the marines don’t claim me as one of their own, and deny any knowledge of this laboratory. I report directly to the Commandant and no one else. My unit has focused on developing a shot for the president of the United States and other government officials in case of a viral attack. The idea was to manufacture a rapid response in the body, to seek out and change the replicating DNA in the virus cells—stopping it in its tracks and giving the injected person a superhuman ability to withstand biological weapons of the most virulent types. Basically, we’ve been trying to put thousands of years of evolution into an injectable
.

Understand there are very few people who know this. Even your father didn’t have the level of clearance to be told. I was brought in because of my research and experiments with genetic code and the immune response. We have had several breakthroughs, but at the same time there was a coalition of nations continuing to work on weaponizing viruses with no known cure, and an unrelenting kill rate. An accident at a facility in China six months ago started a chain reaction that will wipe out an estimated ninety-eight percent of the human population. I have no data to know if it will affect other species or not. You did not hear about this accident on the news. No one will be told about the kill rate. The plan will be to keep panic low and tell the populace anything needed to keep them from rioting. In the weeks to come you’ll see evacuations, miracle medications, government relocations—ignore all of these. Stay at the house. I repeat: do not go with anyone, anywhere. Hide if you have to
.

By day forty-five the virus should have run its course across the globe. It should have burned out. If you are all healthy enough to travel, start then. If not, wait until you can
.

I promised your father I would take care of you, your mom, and your brother if anything happened to him. He promised me nothing would happen to him. We both know your mother hates me for being the one who signed us up. At some point you’ll need to tell her what’s going on. I leave exactly when up to you. Get her to take the shot at any cost—even if you have to stab her with the needle in her sleep
.

Pappi’s mine is outfitted to survive and thrive in many worst-case scenarios. His time in the wars messed with his mind and made him paranoid, which means he’s completely self-sufficient and prepared to live for decades without help. You do not need to be afraid of him. He is the one who taught your dad and me how to be the cockroach
.

Finally, if evolutionary biology has taught me anything, it’s that there will be people on this planet with a natural immunity to this new virus cocktail. So you may meet people along the way. They will be from all walks of life, all ages, and all sorts of personalities. Tell no one where you are going. You may bring up to six people with you, but they cannot know what your ultimate destination is. This is for your own safety. Be cautious of everyone. I have the utmost confidence you and your brother will be able to survive in this new world and I will see you at Pappi’s as soon as you can get there. If you do not make it by Halloween I will try to come to you and get us through till spring and make the trek together
.

Love
,
Uncle Bean

Rabbit read it twice, then handed it back. “We need to burn this letter.”

“Why? I’ve hidden it.”

“Yeah, but if something happened we don’t want bad guys showing up at Pappi’s, right?”

“They don’t have a map.”

“Right, but still.”

“You’re right.” But it meant losing another piece of
before
. What if there was something in there we needed to know and we forgot?

“Do you think anyone else lived? Like everyone in Africa is okay? Or Brazil?”

“Y
ou saw the same television news I did.” The riots, the panic, the city blocks burning to prevent the spread of the unknown disease.

“I know, but maybe somewhere?”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t going to kill the kid’s hope. There was enough of that in everyday life.

Twawki whined. He seemed weaker and thinner than earlier in the day.

Rabbit frowned, “You think maybe there’s medicine here or any of that other stuff?”

“Why don’t you explore the barn and I’ll take the walkie-talkie up to the house?”

“I can go with you.…”

“Nah, keep on eye on Twawki. I think he’s worried about you. Maybe they have medicine for animals here, too?”

“If it’s a working farm, they might.”

I wrapped a towel around my mouth and used a clothespin to keep my nostrils shut. The house wasn’t open to the elements—not that I saw—so if someone was inside, they’d rotted in there. As smells go, there wasn’t anything like it.

I found the remains of the farm’s family in their living room. All but a man were bundled in quilts, with several rounds of shotgun shells littering the floor at my feet. Three kids, someone with long blond braids was maybe the mom, and a guy in dung-covered work boots and patched denim could have been the father. The weapon lay on the floor near his body. None of the kids looked shot, just the adults. And the dog. Couldn’t really blame them for choosing death over surviving if their kids all died. If I didn’t have Rab I wasn’t sure I’d be making this trip.

The coffee table was covered with bright-colored papers. The same kind they’d dropped from the sky over us in the early days. Especially after the power started going out and people were told to stay in their houses, or else.

I picked up one dated a month ago informing people to head toward the nearest university or college campus. There they’d be transported to government-run hospitals and given antiviral drugs. The last lines were enough to make me laugh.
Do not panic. Everything will be all right. Follow directions
.

I opened a window, feeling better with a breeze and air changing. I took a deep breath, fairly certain that I wouldn’t find more bodies upstairs. Looked like they’d gathered together in the end. I found a few wool blankets and clean sweats for
Rabbit, and checked the medicine cabinet. I grabbed all the bottles, over-the-counter and prescription. The granny had asked for gold, medicine, or guns. If that was the new currency, we needed some. I riffled through a jewelry box, grabbed a plain-looking gold locket and what might have been a wedding band. I closed my eyes. Stealing was wrong. Just because they were dead didn’t make it okay, didn’t make it feel better. Maybe necessary, but not better.

I carried the bottles to the sunlight and read the labels. One of them was antibiotics. Twawki was big enough he’d qualify for human weight, but would human drugs work? Rabbit and I would talk it over, but we’d need to chance it.

I found a couple of bottles of whiskey above the kitchen sink, shotgun shells, and another gun. I made several trips, putting it all on the porch.

One corner of the dining room had leather-bound books, the kind that looked expensive and were always special requests at the library. I walked over and scanned the titles until I recognized one.

The sweet, sickly smell of death clung to my hair and I twisted it in a tight French braid. Next beauty salon we passed I was finding clippers and shearing it off.

“I grabbed a book for you.” I handed the book to Rabbit as I brought the last of the stuff to the Jeep.

“What is it?” Rab flipped through it.

“
The Swiss Family Robinson
. Dad used to read it to me when I was little.” There were times when I felt guilty about knowing Dad before the wars started. Rabbit’s whole life Dad was coming and going into combat, into places I knew never made it on the news because Mom watched it religiously until he
died. As if she might get a sense of when he might come back, or where he was, based on news reports. Thing was, Dad said so many times that he was nowhere near the places we heard about on the news—those were missions for other marines. His marines—the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force, or CBIRF—never made the news, and that was the way they liked it. I didn’t really understand then.
I know better now
. “The family survive a shipwreck and build a tree house.”

“Thanks, Nadia.” Rabbit hugged it to his chest like I’d given him something more valuable than a story. Maybe it felt like a piece of Dad to him, too. “I think we should keep moving.”

“Okay.” We finished loading the Jeep and lifted Twawki inside. His paws were swollen and so hot to the touch it was like a horrible sunburn radiating out.

“He’s getting worse.” Rabbit toed the dirt.

“There were a few pills upstairs. Antibiotics for a human.”

“Can we give him those?”

“I think we have to try and then find a veterinarian clinic at the next town. See if there aren’t more pills, or books, or something on what to do.”

“He’s gonna die if we don’t, right?” Rabbit kissed Twawki’s nose.

“I think he might.” My voice dipped to a whisper.

“Then let’s do it. We gotta try.”

I mushed a couple of the pills—the right dosage for Mr. Richard Bjorn, according to the bottle’s label—into a vending-machine peanut butter cookie and got the dog to swallow them.

Hours down the road, Rabbit checked on our patient for the three hundredth time. “Twawki looks better.” Rabbit
twisted around in his seat. Two doses of meds and we were looking at the bottom of an empty bottle.

The dog thumped his tail as if to answer.

“He needs more than we gave him. Mom always said we had to take all the antibiotics or they’d stop working.”

“Yeah, a full course of meds. She knew what she was doing.” Her work as a nurse wasn’t lost on me. And she couldn’t have taken the shot in the beginning? Still be here with us to help? “We need to go into the next town.”

“What if there are people there?”

“We have the gun out now,” I assured him, and myself.

“I can shoot it too. Bean gave those video games and fake guns to both of us. I practiced a lot in my room.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I didn’t hardly play anything else once it started.”

Dad had guns in the house. He taught us how to handle them, how to clean them, how to check to make sure they were unloaded. Mom kept a handgun by her bed whenever Dad was deployed. But promises of shooting ranges and lessons disappeared in the smoke of grief that suffocated our family.

“Me too. I played one late at night.” When I should have been doing homework or chores or sleeping. I was beginning to think I should have had real conversations with Rab a lot sooner. Maybe things would have been different at home if I’d bothered to listen to his answers and ask questions.

The gas light popped on the screen. “We’re low on gas.”

Rabbit glanced down at the map in his lap. “There’s a train station five miles ahead. There might be a parking lot with cars.”

“Is it in a town?”

“Outskirts. Like a suburb thingy.”

“Let’s check.”

The flocks of birds were our first clue.

“What are those?”

“Crows?”

“No, the other ones circling.”

“Vultures?”

“Like in cartoons?”

“Yeah, they’re real.” But why were they circling up ahead? They ate carrion, dead animals—including people, I was sure—but there shouldn’t be anything left. Mom made certain we understood decomposition and what to be afraid of. The myths surrounding disease and dead bodies might work to our benefit since we knew better than most people.

“There’s a train parked at the station.”

“Should we keep going?” I stopped and we watched from a distance.

“Anything?”

“Nope, but they could be hiding.”

“Where’s the next gas stop?”

“If we go south instead of east? Ten miles that way, for sure.”

“East?”

“Dots on the map, but nothing big.”

“Okay, so we need these cars.”

Rab nodded.

“I think you should drive us closer.”
That way I can shoot
.

“I can shoot too.” Rabbit shook his head, reading my mind.

“I know, but I’d feel better if you could get away. If I have to get out of the car again, right? If you’re already in the driver’s seat, then it’ll save time.”

“That makes sense.” Rabbit crawled into the backseat with Twawki.

“What are you doing?”

“We don’t want them to see we’re kids, right?”

Good point
. I slid over and then he climbed back into the seat. I held the gun with both hands.