“Go get Peter Chalmer. Now!”
Kaitlyn saw Josh’s convulsing body and her eyes flew wide with shock.
“Now!” Abbie yelled again.
The Clean Skin girl moved toward the door, her eyes hesitantly scanning for threats before she exited.
Abbie tried to keep Josh on his side as much as she could, but his body was hard to control. She heard Kaitlyn yelling and thumping on the Chalmer door across the street. Moments later Peter burst through Abbie’s door and moved toward his son. She stepped out of the way.
“Should I call an ambulance?” she asked.
“Just give us a moment,” Peter told her, watching Josh carefully, hand gently resting on his shoulder. “Go get his medication off Karen.”
Abbie raced past Kaitlyn, across the street and entered the house. She explained what was going on and Karen quickly handed her the medication Peter was talking about. Abbie raced back across the street and gave it to Peter.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“He has epilepsy,” he told her, studying the medication carefully, then sighed heavily. “He just started this pack two days ago. I think he’s missed a dose!”
Abbie and Kaitlyn stood back and watched as Peter took care of his son, waiting for the seizure to end and coaxing him back to consciousness. Josh eventually slurred some words to indicate the seizure was over. Peter straightened his body to make him more comfortable, and requested a blanket which Abbie swiftly fetched.
“Is he going to be okay?” she asked, handing the blanket to Peter.
“Yes. He’ll sleep for a while now, and he’ll be tired for a few days, but as long as he takes his medication he should be fine.”
Peter sat down on the couch beside his sleeping son, and looked at Abbie, then over at Kaitlyn. Charlie began to cry, so Kaitlyn jogged upstairs to her son.
“Does it happen often?” Abbie asked, taking Peter’s focus off the young Clean Skin girl.
Peter shook his head. “Not so much any more. We’ve managed to get a good handle on things.” He exhaled wearily. “I guess these past few days have taken their toll, though. Stress can bring it on. Lack of sleep. And he must’ve forgotten to take his meds.”
“So we just let him sleep now?” she asked.
Peter nodded. “We need to keep an eye on him, but yes, we just let him sleep it off now. I’ll make him check in with his doctor once he’s back on his feet.”
“How long will he sleep for?”
Peter shrugged. “It depends on the seizure. Sometimes it’s just an hour or so, sometimes it’s several hours.”
“Should we move him to a bed or something?”
“No.” Peter’s eyes darted to Kaitlyn who was walking down the stairs with Charlie in her arms. He turned back to Abbie. “Just let him be for now. When he wakes up I’ll take him home.” Peter shot an accusing glance at Kaitlyn. Abbie could sense that Peter did not want to be here with the Clean Skin girl, did not want to be associated with her in any way that could possibly get Karen caught.
“I’ll keep watch over him,” Abbie reassured Peter. “You should go back and tell Karen he’s okay.”
He nodded, studying his son, then stood from the couch. “You call me no matter what happens,” he admonished her with a pointed finger.
“I will.”
Peter readjusted the blanket and ran his hand quickly over his son’s hair. He threw Abbie one last glance, then ignored Kaitlyn as he left.
Once Peter was gone, Kaitlyn moved to stand beside her. “Is he going to be okay?”
Abbie nodded, letting out a long breath, relieved that it was over. Although, as she exhaled, she noticed how tight her chest felt.
“Shit,” she muttered, moving for the stairs.
“What?” Kaitlyn looked after her.
Abbie went to her room, found her bag and Ventolin spray and inhaled long and deep. She only needed one this time. She’d gotten the spray into her lungs before the spots had appeared in her vision.
“You’ve got asthma?” Kaitlyn asked.
Abbie nodded. “Yeah. But it’s okay. I’m fine.”
*
Dr. Lysart Pellan sat back in his chair. He’d just sent a response to Mary Rodriguez’s email thanking him for calling in on her children, who were now in the care of Mary’s neighbor. He was pleased that Mary was doing okay, but felt for her being confined to a local school gym with other Striped Ones from their area whose houses were located in the Clean Zone. John Seevers, too, had responded to his email, confirming that he was doing well and thanked him for passing on his medication to the soldiers. John was one of the lucky ones. His house was located in the Striped Zone, so he’d been allowed to return to it.
Lysart reached forward and picked up the framed photo of his ex-wife and daughters from its place on his desk. He stared sadly at it, wondering if the madness would ever be over, or whether, perhaps, the government would confine everyone to this town indefinitely; wondering whether Victoryville would become a living museum for the outside world to gawk at.
He removed his glasses, lowered his face into his hand, smoothing his forehead and rubbing his tired eyes.
The phone suddenly rang, startling him, especially as it wasn’t his cell phone, but the home phone. He placed his glasses back on and reached for the handset, hoping it was his daughter, Marissa.
“Hello?” he said, putting it to his ear.
“Dr. Pellan,” a man’s voice answered. He recognized it from his brief conversation earlier that day. It was the reporter Richard Keene. Lysart hadn’t answered any of the calls to his cell phone, but the reporter had found his home number.
“Yes?” He played dumb.
“Do you know who this is?”
Lysart didn’t answer.
“I’m going to suggest you do,” Keene offered, acknowledging the silence. “Otherwise you would’ve made that call from a public phone box.”
Still Lysart didn’t answer.
“I’m a reporter, Dr. Pellan. You knew I’d investigate the cell number and find out the details of my mystery caller. And given your profession, I think it’s safe to assume that you are a smart man who wouldn’t risk being found out if you didn’t want to be.”
Lysart remained silent while he thought things over. “And where are you making your call from?” he eventually asked.
“A public phone box.”
Lysart nodded to himself. “What do you want?”
“The same thing you do. I want the truth.”
“What makes you think I can give you the truth?”
“You called me, Dr. Pellan. You wanted me to find you. You started this.”
“But who says I have the power to finish it?”
“Well, perhaps if we talk . . . maybe I could help you?”
Lysart’s mind ticked over again, suddenly wondering if he’d made a horrible mistake. His eyes fell onto the photograph: his daughters, his ex-wife. Then he skimmed over the emails, left open on his laptop, from his colleagues.
“Dr. Pellan, if there is something the people should know, then they should know it. You want them to know it, that’s why you called me. Let me help you.”
Again Lysart was silent.
Keene seemed to sigh, quietly, patiently. Lysart figured he must be used to sources clamming up. “Listen, you think about it,” the reporter said. “I’m going to go grab a coffee at Leinsel’s Cafe in an hour.”
Keene hung up and Lysart placed the phone back in its cradle. He tapped the fingers of one hand on his desk, moving them as though playing a rhythmic pattern on the piano. It’s what he did when he was lost in thought. Playing the piano was something he’d done as a child, something he still did to relax. However, he had not yet shipped his piano to Victoryville, so it remained at his ex-wife’s house in Washington. God, how he missed it.
He pursed his lips and moved his fingers to his laptop and looked up Leinsel’s Cafe. The reporte
r had provided him an option to meet in person. The cafe was in the Clean Zone, not far from the Civic Hall. Pellan checked his watch: two hours until curfew.
He tapped his fingers on the desk again, picturing Harvey Meeks in his mind, and wondered what he should do.
*
Abbie placed a cup of hot chocolate on the coffee table in front of Josh.
“Hey,” she smiled gently.
He looked a little groggy as he sat up. He rubbed his face and squinted as though the lights were too bright or his head hurt or something.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“A few hours.”
He glanced out the window at the darkness, then looked around the room, his face falling a little. He looked down at the floor. “You saw it?” he asked quietly.
Abbie nodded. “You had me worried for a moment there. We got your dad. He came over and made sure you were alright.”
“We? Oh, Kaitlyn. Where is she?”
“Taking a shower.”
Josh nodded glumly. “So I had a whole audience. Great.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of Josh. You have a condition, that’s all. And it’s controllable.”
He nodded, refusing to make eye contact with her.
“Hey, you wanna know how many times I’ve had an asthma attack in front of people?” Abbie tried to make him feel better. “Hell, I had one when the military first came, remember? I had a whole audience then, you were there, your dad. Shit happens, right?” she shrugged. “We have medical disorders and sometimes they get the better of us, but we deal with it and we move on.”
“Getting short of breath doesn’t quite compare to having a seizure and rolling around like some kind of freak show, Abbie,” he said bitterly.
“You think turning blue and collapsing to the floor is any better? Gasping for breath and wheezing like you’re drowning or choking?”
Josh glanced at her, then turned away, rubbing the back of his hand across his chin. She studied the three stripes that marked him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked gently.
He didn’t answer her.
“You thought I wouldn’t understand? You should’ve told me, Josh. What if something happened and I couldn’t help you.”
“It turned out fine. I just forgot to take my meds.”
Abbie stared at him, and he looked at her, confused.
“What?” he asked.
“How long have you had it?”
He reached forward and took the hot chocolate and sipped it. “My whole damn life.”
“And you’re still ashamed of it?”
Josh looked back at her, a slight furrow in his brow.
“I thought you’d be used to it by now?” she shrugged.
“I don’t tell people because they tend to go all weird on me, and judge me. Like you are, right now.”
“I’m not judging you for having the condition, Josh. I’m just curious why you hide it.”
“It’s no one’s business. Besides, people freak out when I tell them. They don’t know how to handle it, so I just don’t tell them.”
She gave a sympathetic smile. “People sometimes avoid what they don’t understand.”
He shook his head. “You have no idea what it’s like. Asthma is a lot more common and understood.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybes. Being out of breath is kinda normal. Their brains can process that. But you have an episode in front of someone, you flip around on the floor in front of someone, then you see it in their eyes every time they look at you again. They don’t understand it and it makes them uncomfortable. It’s lost me more things than I can count.”
“Like what?” she asked gently.
“Girls don’t tend to like it. One dumped me after I had a seizure in front of her. She didn’t dump me exactly, but was suddenly too busy to see me. I read between the lines, took it as over. She didn’t know how to handle it. It scared her.”
Abbie felt a sadness wash over her. “She was a fool, then. She wasn’t worth it.”
“I lost my spot on my high school football team.” His face filled with sadness, and she thought she saw his eyes glint with tears. “The coach loved my tryout, was very enthusiastic, then found out I had epilepsy, and that ended things. He said I couldn’t be on the team as the risk was too great. If I got a head injury . . . I was a good player. The coach had hinted I might make quarterback, but . . .”
Abbie moved to sit beside him and placed her arm around his shoulders.
“Forget it all, it’s not worth it,” she told him. “Our lives are a little tougher than other people’s, but that doesn’t mean we have to suffer, Josh. That’s exactly why I took up swimming, you know. Best thing for asthma sufferers. I could’ve been scared, but I faced it head on. My parents were good like that,” she smiled sadly. “They always encouraged me to not be a victim. They raised me to treat my asthma as an annoying condition I had, not a life-threatening thing that should rule my life. They encouraged me to carry on as normal. To take it on the chin and be a fighter.”
Josh laughed sadly. “I wish my parents were like that.”
Abbie studied him seriously. “Your father seemed pretty calm, like it was nothing. He seemed to prescribe to that way of thinking.”
“Yeah, we always treated it like it was nothing. Nothing to be spoken about, unless necessary . . . but I was always the fragile one. My younger brother was the normal one. That’s why my mother cries every night because he’s gone. She lost the normal one.”
“Josh!” Abbie scolded him. “That’s not fair. She cries because she’s lost a child. Just like I cry because I lost my family. You can’t hate her for that.”
He clenched his jaw, a troubled, guilty look crossing his face.
“You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. When Kaitlyn went over to your folks house, your father came running straightaway. I saw him. I saw the way he burst into this house. I saw the way he looked at you. He would do anything for you. He loves you.”
“Why didn’t he think of that before he screwed everything up? We wouldn’t even be in this shitty town if it wasn’t for him!”
Abbie sighed. “This town’s not so bad . . . at least, that’s what I always thought. I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“You’d change your mind if you saw what else was out there.”
Abbie looked at him, a little offended by the condescending tone in his voice. She brushed it off. She knew he was hurting, angry at his father and embarrassed by what had happened.
“People screw up, Josh. Unfortunately, that’s what we humans do . . . but we can also forgive.”
Josh placed his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands. “Everything is just so messed up,” he said quietly.
Abbie squeezed him closer, running her hand up and down his arm in consolation.
“We just need to stay strong. Things will work out. They have to. We just need to keep our heads and not do anything stupid.”
She heard him sniff and felt a lump gather in her own throat at the thought of his sadness; of the people who had died; of her missing family; of the aliens; of her own loneliness.
Josh took a moment, then seemed to push his sorrow aside and raised his head. “Have there been any updates?”
Abbie shook her head. “No, but Victoryville is still all over the news. More people in surrounding towns are leaving. If it keeps up we’ll be the only ones left on the Eastern Seaboard. No one wants to be anywhere near us.”
Josh’s jaw clenched momentarily, then gathered himself to say, “Thank you for . . . for taking care of me.”
Abbie smiled softly. “What will we have left, if we don’t take care of each other?”
A moment of silence passed as Josh met her eyes. Sitting side by side, their faces were close, and she thought he might kiss her.
But a knock a
t the door interrupted their bubble of intimacy.
Abbie quickly stood and answered it. It was Austin.
“Yo, Josh,” he said, spying him inside, entering the house uninvited. “There’s another meeting. You gotta come.”
“What? Now?” Abbie asked.
“Yeah.” Austin glanced over his shoulder at her.
“He needs to rest,” Abbie told him.
“No, I’m fine,” Josh said quickly standing and slipping his meds into his pocket.
“Josh—” she began in protest.
“I’m fine,” he said adamantly, his eyes showing he was still determined to hide his condition.
“What are you, his mother?” Austin said, his face screwed up.
Josh gulped down the hot chocolate, then looked at Austin. “Just give me a second,” he said, and disappeared upstairs to the bathroom. Abbie hoped he was taking his meds.
“What’s going on?” she demanded of Austin.
His dark eyes regarded her. He looked a little on edge, a slight sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. “It’s a private meeting.”
“Why? What are you guys up to?”
Austin stared at her as he moved out onto the porch, but he didn’t answer.
“Don’t cause any more trouble for this town,” Abbie said.
Austin’s brow furrowed. “The only people causing trouble for this town are the goddamn outsiders and those Clean Skins. Who do they think they are, herding us like this? Not telling us anything? They’re the ones up to something!”
“Is that you talking, or Roy Kenny?’
Austin gave her an angry look. “No one speaks for me.”
“Just don’t do anything stupid!” she pleaded.
His frowned more intensely. “It’s not us you should worry about. It’s them,” he said, pointing down the road in the direction of the interzone gate. “We’re just trying to protect ourselves.” He took a step closer to her, his larger, athletic frame intimidating her. “You should be careful about what you say, you know. You better decide which side you’re on, because if the shit hits the fan, it’ll be us against them, and we won’t be protecting no traitor.”
“Traitor?” Abbie said, appalled.
“Yeah,” he said, then glanced inside, motioning to the staircase. “Where you hiding that Clean Skin?”
The Time of the Stripes Page 21