Their house was large and cozy, even if it had paper-thin walls and décor regulations through the HOA. Her parents paid for parks and atmosphere, the promise of safe streets and cozy cul-de-sacs. Whispering Waters, their little neighborhood was called. The name implied peaceful joy, happiness, and comfort.
If only her neighbors had known that the congenial scientist, quick with a smile and always available to offer a ladder, an hour of service, or a kind word, was starting a doomsday shelter in his fruit cellar. What would they have thought if they had known that somehow he had predicted the end of the world? That he was clandestinely spiriting away food and water and vaccines and pictures of top-secret experiments right under the noses of his unsuspecting family.
Unsuspecting. It was a true and frightening word.
Ethan had a theory that their mother was in the dark. Otherwise, he pondered, why would she have ever sent Lucy back to school for her homework in the first place? And while it wouldn’t be the first time in history that a man kept secrets hidden from his wife, Maxine’s potential blindness pained Lucy greatly. And it was this lack of knowledge cost her mother both of her eldest children. No doubt their mom assumed they were dead.
And that was even operating under the assumption that her family was alive. It was a stretch and a myth; an idea born from panic and an inability to understand a world where just she and Ethan had survived Armageddon upon the human race.
All these things ran through her brain in a loop and it occupied every second of her time, keeping her alone with memories and flashbacks. She tossed, turned, flung her blankets off, then sought them out and covered herself again. Below, she could occasionally hear a muffled voice. Ethan. Moaning in his sleep. And she kept listening for Grant, a snore or a rustle of the bedsprings—but her parent’s room was silent.
Lucy, back in the room she had dreamed of and wished for while trapped at the school, felt fully alone.
Careful to keep her voice small, Lucy prayed what she could remember from Grant’s prayer at Salem’s memorial and sobbed herself to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Seven days after The Release
Teddy’s high, little voice roused Lucy from sleep.
“My mommy’s making pancakes with syrup,” he said and he poked her in the shoulder with a plastic sword from the King siblings’ communal dress-up bin. “And I’m going to have an orange juice!”
“Oh?” Lucy wondered how this was possible, but she didn’t question the child. She picked up her pillow and flipped it over to the cold side and then rested her head, closing her eyes again.
“I’m a pirate,” Teddy continued.
Then Lucy’s eyes snapped open and she swung her feet to the floor. Slipping past Teddy, who didn’t seem too fazed by her quick departure, Lucy darted up the hallway to her parent’s room and swung open the door. The quilt on their bed had a Grant-sized indent and a blanket that her mom usually kept at the foot of the bed for decoration was tossed to the floor. But Grant himself was nowhere to be seen. Lucy rushed back down the hall and got held up on the stairs as Teddy made his way down step by step. She grabbed him by the waist and then stomped down with him, Teddy protesting with, “Let me down. Pirates like to walk!”
Darla made pancakes over a refreshed fire. She held a skillet over the flame with both hands and then set it down on floor to flip them.
“Pancakes,” she announced without enthusiasm.
“Where’s Grant?” Lucy asked, setting Teddy down beside his mother.
Darla and Ethan exchanged glances.
“Did you take him outside without me noticing? You couldn’t have. No. Tell me…where is he?”
Flipping a pancake, the thick batter sticking a bit in the pan, Darla nodded toward the back of the house. “He’s outside,” she answered, as if this news was mundane and expected.
“He’s okay?” Lucy shrieked and she ran off without waiting for an explanation.
Lucy ran toward their kitchen and then out to their back porch. Grant sat by himself on the steps leading down to the backyard. The air was still damp, but it wasn’t raining. He turned to her and then patted the step next to him. His hair was a mess of tangles and his scruffy chin was growing fuller, the whiskers more defined.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning,” Lucy said, breathless.
“I wasn’t expecting it either,” he replied. “When I opened my eyes this morning I wondered why Heaven looked so much like your parent’s bedroom.”
She laughed and leaned into him. But she was overcome with worry—Grant’s original theory, that they were taking longer to die, seemed to ring in her ears. Maybe he was just an anomaly, maybe it could still happen.
“What does this mean? Are you scared that—” Lucy stopped herself from asking the full question.
“Ethan and I talked this morning. The information your dad,” Grant hesitated, “well, the information that they found was very definitive. No survivors. None. Not ever. In every single study.”
“The virus was created with that endgame in mind, I imagine,” Lucy said and she stared out into the sky.
“So, the fact that I’m still here. It means something. It’s not an accident.”
“Like I keep saying…”
Grant smiled. “Yeah, well, apparently I’m superhuman. This surprise replaces the piano playing I think.”
“So…”
Grant nudged her with his elbow and he smiled. “I’m not going to die today Lucy Larkspur King. I think this means you’re stuck with me.”
“You promise?” Lucy asked.
“Pancake time!” came a cry from inside and then Teddy’s little feet pitter-pattered over to the screen on the kitchen door and the little boy pressed his face against the netting. “Pancake time,” he repeated. And they followed him inside.
“We have to go to Nebraska,” Lucy said over breakfast. They crowded around the dining room table with Ethan in his wheelchair. “Dad told us to get there if anything happened and that’s where we need to go.”
“How?” Darla asked, cutting up Teddy’s pancake pieces into smaller bites, even as he shoved her hand away. “The abandoned cars and all the wreckage? You can’t get out of the city. On top of that it’s…what…a month of walking? Two months?”
“Try three,” Grant said as he shoved a pancake into his mouth.
“Ethan,” Lucy turned to her brother. “We have to do this.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Ethan replied, instantly angry, and the table fell quiet. “Really? You want us to go? How can I do that? I can’t go. How can I go? How can I travel like this?” The timbre of his voice rose and fell, as if he were fighting back a wave of tears. “It’s not like you can just put me in the back of a car and drive out of here. It’s impossible. I can’t do it.”
“We can get you there—” Grant said after a long pause. “We can do it.”
“I can’t even take a dump by myself,” Ethan said and Teddy asked what that meant, Darla whispered a reply in his ear and he snickered. “But you guys want to take me on a cross-country road trip? No, Lucy. I need a doctor. I need medicine…and we’re working on that, but I can’t go anywhere. Not for a long time.”
The room grew silent.
“Besides,” Ethan continued, “what’s in Nebraska? Our family? If they’re alive, why aren’t they coming for us? Have you ever thought of that?”
“Dad went to the effort…”
“Writing some coordinates in a children’s book.”
“…to give us help on what to do if we got separated.”
“From something he might have had caused?” Ethan’s eyes flashed.