What’s gonna happen now to this world? I’m pretty sure I’ll never go to school again. Never have my friends. Probably never go to college. What about the dreams that I had, that my brother had?
They’re just gone.
I’m smart enough to know that water isn’t always good enough to drink when you find it, and the cans of food on the shelf at the store ain’t gonna last forever.
Maybe it’s something I should leave for the grownups to worry about. But something tells me I’m gonna have to be a grown up long before I’m ready.
It ain’t fair that this happened.
But what can you do?
4. Life
“I seen this before but not this bad,” Ethan told Mick as they placed the baby on a dampened cloth. Internally, that wet towel would do nothing, but Baby Boy Doe was like prune. Literally like a prune.
Putting liquids in his bottle were futile, as Doe wouldn’t drink or swallow; he could barely react at all.
“Come on, little man,” Mick pleaded. “You got to drink, something, please drink something.”
“He needs more than water. Maybe they got some of the electrolyte stuff in town in one of the stores. It won’t hurt to look.”
Mick was at a loss. As an officer of the law he had some knowledge of emergency medicine, but it was basic. First aid, CPR, stuff like that.
Baby Boy Doe was naked, his legs barely squirmed, and Mick held him as they got in the truck.
“Ethan, you said you seen this before?”
Ethan soaked a paper towel with water. “About a week ago when we found Billy, yes. He’s six, like your boy. He was dehydrated to the point he couldn’t swallow. He was able to have some reaction. Most of the young ones are starving, thirsty.” He handed the wet towel to Mick. “Put this in his mouth. Maybe he’ll suck on it and get just enough into his system so that he’ll take a bottle.”
Ethan shut the door and walked to his side of the truck.
The water from the towel rolled down Mick’s hand and he brought it to the boy’s mouth. He opened his mouth some and placed the cloth inside. The baby barely reacted.
“Massage his throat,” Ethan instructed. “Help him to swallow, keep him up, you don’t want him to choke.”
“So you have done this before?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t this bad. No one was. I don’t know.” Ethan started the truck. “I saw that little gas station up there, maybe they have something.”
Mick kept constant eye contact with the baby. He didn’t know why the child pulled at his heart so. He kept encouraging the baby to take the cloth, swallow, anything.
Baby Boy Doe’s breathing was rapid, and his protruding stomach snapped back and forth with each breath.
“What did you do before this world went to shit?” Mick asked.
“I was school teacher.”
It made immediate sense to Mick, why Ethan thought of children first, how he cared so much about those left behind. He could see Patrick doing the same had he survived the flu.
“Mick, you seem like a level headed guy,” Ethan said. “But right now, you’re frazzled. Relax, trust me he can sense it.”
“How did this happen, Ethan?” Mick asked with such heartbreak. “How?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, apparently his mom tried, you know? But he was forgotten. He was just forgotten. How?”
“Mick, think about it. I don’t mean to dredge up anything, but when you were suffering your loss, when you and your family were going through the hell of the flu, did you stop to think? Did you at all, stop and wonder, let’s say, about the Smiths down the street, how they had two boys and what would become of them? Did you wonder at all about the kids?”
“I did. Yes, I ran my town,” Mick said. “And our whole town became like a family when the flu hit. We went door to door.”
Ethan exhaled. “That was Lodi. It isn’t the way it was. Unfortunately, unlike Lodi, no one really cared what happened outside their own home. You folks were just different.”
Ethan’s words hit hard to Mick and rang a painful reality. Yes, the people of Lodi cared for each other, came together and rallied to each other’s aid. But in essence, Mick did the same as everyone else in the country. He didn’t care about what was happening outside his house. Only difference was, All of Lodi was his house.
After thinking about it, Mick simply said. “No, no we weren’t. We were the same, Ethan, just on a different scale.”
Mick held the baby with the cloth to his mouth. How ironic that such a small, helpless child could bring such a big revelation. Mick had only focused on what happened to his home, his family, and for the first time, the hard reality of what had happened to the world pummeled him.
Rose Owens was still angry with her son. It wasn’t like when he was a teenager and didn’t check in. Mick was a grown man. In fact, he was the Chief of Police in the small town of Lodi, Ohio. But he had left.
He stated he had good reasons, but to Rose there wasn’t any good reason to up and leave the town that you had led through such a horrendous ordeal.
She credited her son and a couple of others with saving the lives of half the population of Lodi. Half. While the loss seemed great when spoken, it paled in comparison to the rest of the world.
Rose thought about the rest of the world; she was certain her son did not.
To him, Mick had lost his world — the love of his life and the boy who was no less than a son to him. He didn’t care hide nor hair about anything except what he lost and what he still had remaining.
Tigger and Chris.
Rose was sure she didn’t play into the ‘still had’ factor, or else he wouldn’t have left. She understood his reasoning, but she didn’t like it. There were too many painful memories in Lodi and Mick wanted to take the boys away. She wasn’t sure where, though. Tom’s family cabin in West Virginia? Would they even get that far? Rose doubted it.
Mick made decisions his entire life based on the passion in his gut and not the knowledge in his head and that worried Rose. The boys had just lost their mother, brother and grandmother. As much as a testosterone filled getaway seemed like the thing to do, Rose wondered if Mick had a clue what was outside the town limits.
Rose had returned to Lodi at the height of the flu epidemic. She watched people panic, rush to the streets, to the hospitals, break into stores. She saw the confusion and chaos. And it wasn’t long before that Lodi put up an iron wall to keep people out. A wall many tried to break through.
Mick was there to hold it; he was the one who kept law and order. And now there was only one deputy remaining, one law enforcement agent. Mick was gone.
Did he suddenly think with the end of the flu, so came the end of any threat? Rose thought it unfair of him and selfish. Yes, he was hurt. But so were the boys. And so was everyone else in Lodi.
Being hurt and emotional left one vulnerable. What kind of world remained out there where he was taking the boys? Nothing was hunky dory anymore — she knew that. Rose’s gut wrenched with worry for her son and grandsons. Mick was a big man, but was he big and strong enough to keep those boys safe?
Mick and those boys were all she had left in the world. And while she prayed for their safety, she grew angrier by the hour. They had been gone a little over a day and it was a day too long.
She stayed in her home, declining dinner with Tom and Lars, who supported Mick’s decision. Of course they would. They weren’t out in the world like she was. Tom checked off a clipboard, sending out trucks for supplies and opened a video store.
Rose couldn’t sit idly by, pretending that all was fine while watching a movie she picked up at Tom’s. If things were going bad during the flu, the bad didn’t die off.