Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

Miller put a thin arm around Chad’s shoulder. “Son, what you’ve had to do the last few weeks…don’t you ever let anyone say you ain’t a man now.”

Chad turned without a word and walked slowly toward his house through the snow. Mr. Miller struggled to keep up with Chad’s longer, strength-filled strides. Chad wondered again why he never caught the sickness. Most of the people in the neighborhood had gotten sick—children, men, women, even pets. Chad never even had so much as a sniffle. Many of the houses in the subdivision had been completely emptied.

Mr. Miller sneezed rather violently just behind him and Chad turned his aching mind to that painful thought again. Why? The neighbors to the south had all died two weeks back. His mom had called for help from the police, but they’d refused to come. Half the police in the county were either dead or bedridden. Contact with all the sick and suffering people had taken its toll on the police and doctors all over the country. The small force of first responders in their little patch of north Texas had been decimated.

Chad crunched his way across his backyard in silence. The lights in the house flickered. Everything went dark for a few seconds, then came back on. Most of the houses in the little community had already gone permanently dark. There weren’t many people left to care anyway.

His thoughts went back to Mom. When the Johnsons took sick during that first awful week, she went to help their young children. Before the week was out, the news—and the bird flu—had spread around. His mom didn’t even pause to take precautions. She said if she was infected, it was too late to worry. She said she was going because the children needed her—everyone else was scared to go. The world was scared. Chad went with her, despite Dad’s bitter protest and tears from his sisters.

Chad had ultimately been the only one who ever walked out of their home again. His childhood tendency to never get sick when his schoolmates got the chicken pox, measles, mumps, even mono or the common cold, had once been seen by everyone as a blessing. Chad looked at himself in the pale reflection of his porch door. They were wrong.

It was a curse.

His reflection did not lie. He still looked fresh-faced and healthy, despite losing just about everyone in his life. He hadn’t heard from his relatives in weeks and had assumed the worse. His uncle in Montana admitted he was sick. Sue, his aunt in West Virginia, had called just before the phones went out to say she was sick and that Uncle Don had already passed. She cried to him on the phone that there was no one willing to help. She was hysterical. Uncle Don’s body was still in the house and her babies had died. A single gunshot was the last thing Chad had heard before he hung up the phone.

Mom, wrapped up in blankets and taken by the fever in bed, knew from his face what had happened to her sister. She had heard nothing from the rest of her family in Maine.

Mr. Miller stood waiting at the door, wheezing and shivering from the exertion of walking across the yard in the snow. “You gonna open the door or stand there like—” He sneezed, then wiped his nose. “I don’t know how you never got sick…”

Chad opened the door and heard his mother’s voice echo through his mind.

“My strong little man…never gets sick…” were the last words Mom had whispered to him from her cracked lips. There were tears in her bloodshot eyes, from the fever or from fear or love—Chad never knew which. He supposed it didn’t matter anymore.

Chad remembered the moment it had started.

It was when they had come back from visiting the Johnson family down the street—Mom had sneezed. Just once; a small thing, really.

Two days later, his sisters were sick. Four days after that, Dad died struggling and thrashing in bed, unable to breathe and delirious from the fever. His sister Gracie soon followed, choking on the liquid in her lungs. Chad hated the awful memory of the pink-tinged foam that had bubbled out of her nose and mouth at the end.

His baby sister, Helen, whom he had thought might be immune like himself, was walking from the bathroom and fell down on the floor without a sound. She was dead a few minutes later. At least she hadn’t suffered.

Chad shivered as remembered Mom’s scream when she first saw Helen’s face, with its blue, almost indigo coloring near the ears, eyes, and over the cheeks. That sweet face that had so many times looked up to Chad in wonder and adoration, had looked then like some sort of B-rate horror monster.

Mom had clung to life for another week of pain and misery. At last, with the dried blood caking her hair and fresh blood smeared on her face, she too, succumbed and died, wheezing and wild eyed.

He alone had survived the terrible disease unscathed. As far as he knew, he was the only person anywhere that hadn’t gotten sick from what they called the Blue Flu.

Chad had dutifully helped Mom care for the sick while she could, whether they were next door or across the hall. He had spray-painted the red “X” on homes that had sick inside. He had later sprayed the black “X” on homes that had dead inside, just like the government advised.

He had helped bury the dead when the authorities wouldn’t come because they were scared or sick themselves. He had helped bury the Johnsons. After Mom had gotten sick, Chad had been the only one left to care for their elderly neighbors, Doug and Emma Miller. He helped Mr. Miller bury Miss Emma. Chad was left alone then, to bury his family, one by one. He’d never even so much as sneezed.

Not once.

Guilt flooded over him. Why had he been left untouched? Why had he been spared the sickness, only to live through the mind-shattering sadness of watching his family die? He had wracked his brain for days, trying to think of some heinous act he had committed that would've offended God so mightily.

Now, looking out the open door toward the little mound of fresh snow far back in the yard, he wondered again why he wasn’t there next to them. What did he do to deserve this fate? To see all those he cared for wither and die around him, without sharing in their suffering or even be able to comfort them? They all, in the end, had become angry with him. Everyone did—they were jealous of his health. All except Mom. She had been so happy to know he would live on, strong and healthy as ever.

Hell, he was even mad at himself, for not being able to cry. For not being able to feel.

Chad sighed as a snowflake tickled his nose. He shut the door and returned to the relative warmth of the empty house.

When people all over the world realized that the sickness was a real pandemic and not just another widely publicized scare, it was too late. All of the planning the government had done, all the fear it had been accused of starting came to be justified in one little announcement.

It’s real and it’s here.

Not confined to faraway places like Indonesia, Hungary, Africa, or even Europe. It was in our cities, our malls, our schools, and churches. It was in our backyard.

And it was too late.

Mom had huddled with him by the fire, watching the newscasts grow less and less frequent as the media began getting sick. Anyone who came in contact with the sick, human or animal, took a great chance with their life. Some had chosen to come to work anyway and ended up paying dearly for their stubbornness.

Still, Chad could not cry. Mom had. She was terrified. His mother, the rock of his life, alone in the safety of their home, had cried for hours on Dad’s shoulder at the waste of it all; the pain and suffering, the fear. When the phone rang that night and Betty Johnson had called to say her husband had died, Mom dried her own tears and fearlessly went to help. Chad had gone with her. That was Mom—her heart had always ruled her life.

Chad felt nothing. Empty. Alone. He walked to the heat register and tapped it again.

“I don’t know why you bother, boy. You know just as well as I do, the propane man ain’t been through here lately. We ain’t getting any more.”

Chad looked over his shoulder at the sick old man. Inside under the lights, his face was thin and gaunt, the skin stretched over his light frame. When the coughing seized him, his whole body shook. His eyes were runny with fever. Chad could smell death on his last friend in the world. He walked to the window and looked out through the snow to his family. The shovel was still lying next to the house. He sighed and figured he’d have to bury Mr. Miller in a few days. He glanced into his neighbor’s yard and saw the little tombstone for Emma. He’d put Doug next to Emma. Miss Emma would like that.

A thought occurred to him that almost made his heart stop. His family would forever be incomplete. He wouldn’t get the sickness; he knew it wouldn’t hurt him.

“It’s a blessing son, a true blessing. A medical miracle!” the doctors had said, all smiles. He remembered them saying that at his annual check-up for school every summer.

He took off Dad’s hat and dropped it on the table. Snow started melting on the floor as he shrugged out of his jacket and outerwear. The temperature inside was only a bit warmer than outside, since he had run out of propane three days ago.

“You’ll catch your death too, young man, if you take that coat off,” said Mr. Miller in between coughing fits. He eased himself into a chair by the fireplace. “Aaaah,” he sighed. “I feel better already.” He was still bundled up from outside. Chad hoped the old man’s gnarled hands