supposed to take Conrad’s word for it?” Mom asked.
Jeryl ignored her, kept talking to me. “Best stay away from his house for a while.”
“That’s it?” I said. “Half the deer, and I best stay away from him?”
Silence. Heavy like a fresh blanket of snow. The fire snapped.
Jeryl turned to the door. “I better make sure Ramsey came back from the river all right.”
“Dammit, Jeryl,” Mom said. “We heard the shot. What happened?”
“He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re asking.” He turned to her then, meeting her eyes. “But he won’t be bothering us anymore.”
Things I miss about summer:
The sun.
Warmth.
Wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
Freezies from the corner store.
Sandals.
Swimsuits.
Hot dogs.
Hamburgers.
Any food that isn’t moose, elk, deer, rabbit, goat cheese, goat milk, potatoes, and carrots.
Flights to California.
Watching movies.
Dad teaching me how to fish.
Dad reading Walt Whitman.
Dad telling me to go to bed and that he knows that it’s still light out but it doesn’t matter. It’s nighttime.
Dad singing in the shower.
Dad laughing.
Dad.
Dinner was venison that night. I mean, why not? And potatoes and carrots. They tasted a lot like the potatoes and carrots we ate last night, the night before, the night before that, the night before that, and the night before that. Good old easy-growing, durable, freezable, nutritious potatoes and carrots. Thank God for them. Sometimes, I’d close my eyes and pretend that the potatoes were french fries and the carrots were deep-fried and covered in soy sauce. It didn’t make them taste any better. Ken ate with us, and Ramsey and Jeryl stayed at their place, maybe cooked up a few grayling if Ramsey had any luck at the river.
Outside, large, flat UFO flakes had begun to fall. The fire popped, Mom’s fork clinked against her plate, Ken’s mouth made a sucking sound as his teeth gnawed at the rough meat, and I stared at the wall.
Regular old dinner with our regular old family in a regular old world.
I remember sitting by the fire drinking tea that Mom made from the rhododendron leaves she collected in the spring—didn’t taste very good, but it was a nice change from water and goat milk—when Ramsey asked Jeryl how the wars began. When everything started, Ramsey had been too young to have really known what was going on.
Jeryl took a deep breath and launched into it. “Well, it wasn’t sudden, I’ll say that much. It wasn’t one event. No meteorite, earthquake, or tsunami. Those things you always hear about. The seeds of it started early in the century—you read about nine-eleven in school?—and the anger just sort of snowballed. I don’t think one person ever said to the other: ‘Is this it? Is this the apocalypse?’ You’d hear about the occasional bombing, shooting, but otherwise things were mostly calm, relatively speaking. You could watch the news and hear about the War on Terror mixed in with a feel-good bit about pandas being born in the zoo.”
“So how did it start?”
“The last attack. I remember sitting down with my coffee and flipping on the news. Every channel was the same. Explosion had gone off in the Pentagon. Bunch of nut jobs managed to hijack a drone and blow up half the building. Hundreds were killed. And that was the last straw. The US went kamikaze. We bombed the hell out of Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan. But it didn’t stop there. It spread. Countries got labeled as either enemies or allies. You were either pro- or anti-America. There were no other options. When North Korea and Mongolia were named terrorist countries, China started getting nervous. Started flexing its muscles. Started chumming with the wrong people. And we didn’t like it. We wanted China to break all trade, all ties with them. China refused.
“It seemed nuclear war was inevitable. So we dropped the first one. Meant to take out China’s atomic bombs. Didn’t work. Either they had backups or their nukes weren’t in Beijing. Millions were killed, so they retaliated. They nearly took out New York with their own nuke. Luckily, we got it in time, and the bomb hit the water. Devastated the city either way—from the tidal waves and radiation sickness. Then everyone seemed to go nuke happy. North Korea nuked Japan. Russia sent nukes to Turkey. The world was on the verge of collapse, everyone trying to blow each other out of the water. But then, next thing you know, the Asian flu hits, or the yellow flu.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s racist,” Ramsey said.
“Nah. People are too sensitive. Anyway, the flu started wiping out Asia. Guaranteed, we sent it to them somehow. I don’t know what we did, maybe poisoned their water with it, but I promise you this: the flu in Asia was a weapon sent by America. With the Asian travel ban, I guess they didn’t count on it coming back across the Pacific so quickly. When the first case was reported in Florida, organizations started popping up. The IMA, Refugees for Peace. And especially the DCIA: Disease Containment and Immunity Advancement. Everyone called them Immunity. Or the Immunizers. They were funded by some corner of the government no one had ever heard of. Apparently, they’d been around for years, only no one knew anything about them until the flu.”
“I remember seeing them on the news,” Ramsey said. “They were the ones with the white stars pinned to their shoulders. Supposed to protect us from the spread.”
“That’s them. They started showing up in schools, businesses. They set the containment rules and made us wear masks. They were doing research, supposedly. All I saw was them with soldiers, trucks, and guns, blocking off safe zones from people trying to get in. And telling cameras they were ‘working on it.’ They sent that vaccination, but a lot of good it did. Was probably just sugar water.”
“Sugar water?”
“Yeah. By this point, Asia was decimated. Millions of people were dying, and the survivors were migrating out any way they could, even though international travel was forbidden. Once it started to spread in the States, it was lights-out fast enough. People dropped like flies. Then planes stopped flying, mail stopped coming, hospitals and schools closed, then the news stopped reporting. Total information blackout. People panicked—those who weren’t dead already. Then the exodus. Like Moses. Most people didn’t know where they were going, just somewhere without a lot of infected people. The cities got pretty ugly. With the riots, looting, gangs, and all the fires. No fire department to stop them. Remember the huge one outside Fairbanks? Wind blew the smoke right through Eagle. It was hazy for days. So many
