The second reason he wished he could stay asleep was that the illness he now realized had been coming on the night before had taken full control of his body. His throat, his chest, his head — they all screamed at him for attention. Even his skin hurt.
“Daddy?”
He forced his eyelids open.
“Daddy, where are you?” Ellie’s voice drifted into the living room from the back of the house. “Mommy doesn’t want to wake up.”
Oh, Jesus!
Despite the pain, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered into the hallway. His daughter wasn’t there.
“Baby, where are you?”
“Daddy?” She was in the master bedroom.
No, no, no!
When he reached the door to the room he’d shared with Wendy, he saw Ellie sitting on the bed where he normally slept, his wife lying still beside her.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said. He tried to smile as he walked over to the bed.
“Mommy’s still asleep,” Ellie whispered.
“Mommy’s not feeling very well.”
“Like last night?”
“Yes, like last night.” He wanted to pick her up but didn’t think he had the energy, so he held out his hand instead. “Come on. I’ll make you some breakfast.”
After she ate, he put Elf on TV, and let her play with her new toys by the Christmas tree. He then sat down on the couch and promptly fell back to sleep.
Several tugs on his arm woke him. His eyes hurt even worse than before—everything hurt worse.
“Movie’s over, Daddy,” she said. She studied him, her face pinched. “Are you okay?”
“Think I’m a little sick, too, sweetie.”
Her eyes softened dramatically. “Oh, no. You want me to make you some soup?”
Despite his condition, he laughed, or tried to, anyway, as it quickly became a cough.
When the spasm passed, he sat up. “What would you like to watch now?”
“Rudolph?”
“Good choice.”
Once he got the program going, he asked Ellie, “You feel okay?”
She nodded without taking her eyes from the TV.
“You don’t have to cough? No runny nose?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What about your head?”
“My head?”
“Does it hurt?”
She put a hand on top of her head and said, as if it were a silly question, “My head doesn’t hurt.”
“Of course not,” he said. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. “You watch your show. I’ll be right back.”
As she picked up her bear and started dancing him to the music, Nolan staggered out of the room. Using the hallway wall to keep his balance, he returned to the master bedroom. There was no denying his condition was mirroring that of his wife’s the day before. He knew that meant his life could be measured in nothing more than hours. It wasn’t the thought of dying that scared him. It was Ellie.
She wasn’t sick, not yet, anyway. Perhaps she would wake up tomorrow feeling like he did now, but there would be no one here to take care of her. And what if she was still well? Maybe she’d be alive for days without anyone to help her. A horrifying image of Ellie sitting on his bed, trying in vain to wake both him and Wendy, flashed through his mind.
He grabbed his cell phone from his nightstand, and started working his way through his contact list, calling everyone he knew living in the Boulder area. But the few who actually answered sounded as sick as he was. When he reached the end of the list, he dropped the phone on the floor and buried his face in his hands.
What was he going to do? He couldn’t leave Ellie alone. She was barely five, for God’s sake.
Wendy’s phone, he thought. She would have the numbers for people he didn’t.
He found her purse on the kitchen table. After pulling out her cell, he took a quick peek in at Ellie. She seemed to be doing fine, so he returned to the rear of the house where she wouldn’t hear him. But what had started off with hope ended in the same despair he’d experienced with his own contact list. No one could help.
Out of options, he tried 911 again. Busy. So once more he dialed the general number.
“Please, I need help,” he said as soon as the voicemail beep sounded. “My name is Nolan Gaines. I’m ill and don’t think I’ll make it through the day, but I have a daughter here. She’s only five. Her name is Ellie. She’s not sick yet. She’ll be all alone once I’m gone. Please. Please send someone to help her.”
He hung up without realizing he hadn’t left an address.
“Doing okay?” he asked as he walked back into the living room.
Without looking up, Ellie said, “They shouldn’t be so mean to him just because he has a red nose.”
“No, they shouldn’t.” He sat on the couch. “Hey, come back here and sit with me.” When she was on the couch beside him, he put his arm around her and kissed her on top of her head. “I love you, Ellie. I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Daddy.”
The words were like a tonic, easing his concern for a moment, but not taking it completely away.
“I love you, baby,” he whispered.
14
It was exhaustion that had finally caused Martina to fall asleep in the early hours of the morning, but her bone-weary coma was only able to mask her anxiety for so long, and four hours after her eyes had shut, her sense of dread opened them again.
She shuffled into the bathroom and forced herself to take a shower. As the hot water poured down her back, she rolled her head around and around, working the kinks out of her neck. Finally, she started to feel human again. She paused.
She was feeling human again.
What she was not feeling was sick.
Was it just taking longer to grab hold of her system? Or had she somehow managed to not catch it yet?
After she dried off and dressed, she went into the kitchen, wet a rag, filled a glass with water, and once more started her rounds. Her first stop was the room Mrs. Weber had died in. Martina had moved the woman outside the previous afternoon, so Pamela now had the room to herself.
Martina sat on the bed and slipped a hand under Pamela’s head to lift it, but quickly realized the girl didn’t need any water. Like Mrs. Weber, Pamela was dead.
Martina found it hard to breathe as she backed out of the room. She had planned on checking her parents next, but changed her mind and headed to the living room first. There, she found her brother dead, too, and though Riley was still breathing, Martina thought it wouldn’t be long before she joined Donny and Pamela.
Steeling herself, she reentered the hallway and walked up to the door of her parents’ room. For a moment, she just stood there, unable to open it.
Finally she forced herself to turn the knob.
Her mother and father lay side by side, pretty much in the same position they’d been in when she last checked on them. The one big difference was that the pain that had been etched on their faces was gone.
She had braced herself for this. She had known deep down what she was going to find, but actually standing there and seeing her parents like this, realizing she could never talk to them again, was beyond devastating. A part of her wanted to lie down between them, to take her parents’ hands in hers as she waited for her own death to come, but her feet wouldn’t move.
It was noise in the other room that finally stirred her — a thump, and a groan, then something falling on the floor. Martina returned to the living room, and stopped abruptly. Riley was sitting on the couch, her elbows propped on her knees, her head in her hands.