“Think it over,” Paul said. “We’re going to leave tomorrow sometime, hoping to get back on the road and that the route will be passable. If you want to come, you…well, I think getting out might do you some good.”
Olivia could tell from Paul’s voice that he already knew what Roosevelt’s answer was going to be. There was also a very slight bit of sadness to his tone, indicating that he’d already accepted the fact that his grandfather might very well die on this mountain, much sooner rather than later.
Sensing the shift in the conversation, Roosevelt leaned in closer to Joyce. “How’s that pudding?”
“Good!” Joyce said, her tongue coated in it.
“I bet it is,” Roosevelt said, plucking up his own cup and stripped the plastic top off.
Olivia watched Joyce smile at the old man as he spooned a huge amount into his mouth. She then looked over to Paul and saw that he was struggling to keep tears away. She wanted to say something but didn’t want to keep pushing. She was glad the conversation seemed to already be over, glad that Joyce was genuinely smiling and that she seemed to have put a very bright spot on Roosevelt’s day—or week, or month for that matter.
She once again found herself wondering how much harder all of this must be with close family to mourn. She had friends, of course, but something about the suddenness of it all and the absurdity of the situation made it hard for her to fully grasp. Jacki, for instance; there was a very large part of Olivia that assumed Jacki was dead, and that she’d died in the very rough and gruesome way this virus was taking people out. She wanted to cry, wanted to mourn the loss, but for reasons that made no real sense to her, she could not fully allow it to sink in.
So, for the moment, she just sat there at Roosevelt’s dinner table, in a cabin tucked away in mountains that felt like a different world. She allowed herself to find joy in watching Joyce and Roosevelt bond over something as simple as chocolate pudding and before she knew it, she was reaching for a cup, too.
Chapter 30
Paul lay on his grandfather’s couch, staring at the ceiling. It was dark outside, the sort of rural mountain night that seemed to seep in through the windows and swallow everything up. He lay in the dark, listening to the tick of the old clock on the wall between the living room and kitchen. The place still smelled of fresh-baked biscuits and sausage, even three hours after they’d all eaten. The smell and the absolute quiet outside should have had him knocked out and heading for sleep, but it did the opposite. He felt trapped, like he was wasting time and it could mean very bad news for him, Olivia and Joyce. Had he been stalling to come here rather than trying to head straight to Minnesota to get Joyce to her father? Was he scared of failing in the end and intentionally trying to draw things out?
Little Joyce was sleeping with Olivia, sharing a twin-sized bed in the second bedroom—a room that Paul felt certain had not been occupied since his last visit out here almost three years ago. They’d all decided to go to sleep early, though they honestly hadn’t had much of a choice in the matter. With Grandpa Roosevelt’s biscuits sitting heavy in his stomach and the weight of the day pressing on him, Paul had struggled to keep his eyes open past eight o’ clock.
Funny enough, he’d come awake just after two in the morning and had not been able to fall back to sleep. Laying in the dark, he made himself look at his phone again. He wasn’t even sure why he had the stupid thing powered up. With no service and no way to connect to the internet to hopefully find a news source, it was nothing more than a clock and flashlight. He recalled some information he’d received during a workshop back at the precinct about how cell towers worked and how the police could use them to their advantage. If he recalled it correctly, he was pretty sure cell towers weren’t totally dependent on the power grid—that some even had back-up generators. If this was the case, he wondered if the issue they were having was just that all of the lines and signals were jammed because so many panicked people were trying to use them all at once.
Pondering this, he saw that it was 4:05; he’d been laying in the darkness of this old familiar place, unmoving with only his thoughts, for almost two hours now.
As he set the phone back down by the side of the couch, he heard a very light footstep in the dark, the floorboards creaking somewhere behind him. It was followed by a soft, hesitant voice. “You couldn’t sleep, either, huh” Olivia asked.
He turned towards her voice, watching the darkness shift around her. “I got a few good hours in. But yeah…the last two or so, I’ve just been laying here. You?”
“Joyce woke me up about half an hour ago. She was talking in her sleep, talking to her mother. It broke my heart and I just had to get away for a second.”
Paul heard a tremor in her voice but she seemed to get control of herself before the tears came. After a few seconds, she whispered in the dark. “I need you to be honest with me, Paul. Do you think we can make it? Do you think we’ll get to Minnesota?”
“I don’t know,” he said, almost right away. “What we saw in Brownstone yesterday took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting that. So right now, my biggest hope is that the government is going to come up with some master plan and it will help us get Joyce to her father. But there’s another thing we have to consider, you know…especially after Texas, and considering how damned fast this thing spreads.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve thought about it, too—the very real chance that he’ll be dead before we can reunite them.”
Paul was glad she’d said it first ; he wasn’t sure he’d be able to bring himself to dash her hopes in such a way.
“You okay?” Paul asked.
“Of course not,” she whispered, giving a nervous little chuckle. “But I’m making sure I’m pretending well. For Joyce. I just…you know, I’ve tried calling her father about a dozen times since we got here. He still has electricity, so something about that makes it seem likely that maybe the cell service would work. I have to keep trying even if I know it won’t—”
“You’re doing your best,” Paul said. He was still lying on his side, sensing her sitting down on the floor at the edge of the couch. “If you looked after all of the other kids at your daycare the way you’re taking care of her, you had some very lucky kids…and parents.”
“Thanks,” she said with a sigh.
“Forgive the personal question, but do you ever want any of your own?”
“That’s one of many marks against me.” He could tell she was trying to be sarcastic, but he could hear the hurt in her tone. “I can’t have kids. It’s all medical stuff I’d rather not get into. And even if I wanted to, I tend to not be what men are looking for, so the whole husband thing never quite panned out.”
“I find that very hard to believe,” Paul said. “If I were about twenty years younger, this whole journey may have been a little more awkward for m—”
They were interrupted by a sound from the right, further back in the house. It was a nasty sound, a noise that was all too familiar to them. Paul sat straight up, his thoughts immediately going to Joyce. No, he thought. No, no…
The sound came again and this time, it was clearer. It was not Joyce, but his grandfather.
He was throwing up.
Paul reached for the lamp on the small end table by the couch. He nearly knocked it into the floor in his rush. The light blinded him and he also saw Olivia shielding her eyes. As he got to his feet, rushing to the back of the house, he heard Olivia behind him. “Paul…oh no…”
He turned back to her, his mind splitting off into a million different directions. “Stay with Joyce. I’ll take care of him.”
“I can help if you need it.”
“I know. But if she wakes up and hears all of this, you should be there.”
Olivia nodded, her face seeming to droop slightly with the frown that covered the bottom half of her face. As they made their way to the hallway, she opened the door to the small bedroom, the first room in the hall. Just as she closed it behind her, Paul saw his grandfath
er come stumbling out of the bedroom at the end of the hallway. He was leaning against the wall, his legs trembling. Paul rushed to his side to hold him up and was instantly struck by how hot the old man was. It was like walking by a furnace.
“You’re okay,” Paul said, guiding his grandfather to the bathroom at the end of the hall.
Roosevelt let out a moan as Paul helped him to the toilet. “Looks like the virus took me up on the challenge,” he said. “Climbed the mountain and came right after me.”
Paul opened his mouth to say something, but then Roosevelt started to make a gagging noise. Paul lowered him to the toilet as quickly as he could, barely making it. His grandfather vomited into the bowl. The groaning sounds of pain that followed were worse than the act itself.
“Stay right there,” Paul said. “I’m going to get you some water.”
Roosevelt only nodded, sitting on the floor with the side of his face propped up on the toilet seat. He was only illuminated by the light coming from the living room lamp, but it was enough light to see that he was somehow pale and reddening at the cheeks at the same time. Paul rushed into the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the kitchen sink. By the time he got back to the bathroom just a handful of seconds later, Roosevelt looked to have fallen asleep in the same position—on the floor, head propped up on the side of the toilet.
“Grandpa, drink this,” he said.
Roosevelt opened his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. It caused him to cough, a nasty wet sound that seemed to come all the way down from his toes. He was so weak that he couldn’t even lift his arms for the glass. Paul dropped to his knees, cradled his grandfather’s head with his right hand, and guided the glass to his mouth. The water went in slowly and Roosevelt sipped it down. When he tried to take in a small gulp, he gagged and instantly threw up again.
Paul did his best not to panic. He placed the glass on the floor and opened the little medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink. As he’d suspected, there was very little in it. Just some prescription meds for a handful of back and knee problems, a few stray band aids, a bottle of Ibuprofen, a tube of generic lotion, and a seriously out of date thermometer. He grabbed the Ibuprofen and the thermometer, not sure either would do much good.
“Think you can swallow these?” Paul asked.
“Maybe,” Roosevelt answered in a gasp. “But why? If I got it, I’m dead, right?”
Paul knew he was right but, in that moment, refused to accept it. He popped the top on the pills and dumped three into his hand. “Let’s at least try. Open up.”
He put the pills into his grandfather’s mouth and watched with great sadness as he tried to get them down. One went down okay but with the second one, there was more gagging. He didn’t puke this time, but seemed to be in more pain than either of the vomiting attacks had caused.
The thermometer was an old school oral one, likely one of the first digital models ever released for home use. Roosevelt Gault was many things, thrifty being high on his list of qualities. The man would make a watch run for twenty years, a car for the same amount of time, and, apparently, a thermometer for Lord only knew how long. When Paul placed it into Roosevelt’s mouth, Paul felt a wave of heat coming off of him.
He sat there, waiting for the beep, once again cradling his grandfather’s head in his hand. He was sweating and the stink of sickness came off of him, musky and somehow sweet. When the beep came, Paul took the thermometer and checked the reading.
My God, he thought, tossing it aside as if it had bitten him. It read 105.8 as it skittered across the bathroom floor.
“It’s okay,” Roosevelt said. “We can’t all be superhuman…strong and immune like you.” He chuckled at this and it was one of the saddest sounds Paul had ever heard.
With no other alternatives, Paul carefully picked him up and carried him out of the bathroom in a modified threshold carry. The heat coming off of him was almost stifling; his sweat was sticky and slick. But the worst thing of all was the lack of weight. Sure, the sickness had little to do with that, but it was a reminder of how old and fragile his grandfather had become. In this state, it would not take the virus long to take him out at all.
Paul carried him into the bedroom, careful to stay away from the area where Roosevelt had thrown up for the first time. The sheets were drenched in sweat and Paul hated to put him back on them. He knelt by the bed and took Roosevelt’s hand.
“I don’t know what else to do for you, Grandpa,” he said. Even as he said it, he thought of driving down into Brownstone to raid the little general store—to break in if he had to. But he knew that even if that crappy little store had anything to help with the virus (which he was sure it would not), there was a very good chance that his grandfather would be dead when he got back.
“Thank you, Richard,” Roosevelt said.
Richard, Paul thought. It was his father’s name. His brain was getting weaker and more easily confused as the fever tore through him.
“No problem,” Paul said.
He squeezed his grandfather’s hand and set his forehead on the edge of the bed. He listened to his raspy breathing, growing slower and more labored. Paul wondered how long he’d lay in bed with the virus starting its work—how long the fever had been growing and how much time had already been obliterated from his final moments before he’d been stirred awake only to throw up on his bedroom floor.
It wasn’t fair. Paul hated the immature quality of the statement, but it was exactly how he felt. It was not fair and, on the heels of that, he wondered if he and Olivia had brought the virus here. Had they been asymptomatic carriers? Had his arriving here killed his grandfather? The thought of it tore him apart, but he also recalled the sick man that had been gunned down in the road just a little more than a mile from this very cabin.
This cabin…this cabin where he’d learned to clean his first rifle, where he’d climbed his first tree, where his grandfather had told him stories about working as a coal miner and how most of his friends were dead because of something called black lung. This cabin, where he’d first heard his father whisper to his grandfather, as if he were ashamed, that he thought he, Paul, was going to grow up to be one hell of a fine man. It was the only time Paul had ever heard his father say such a thing about him, and he’d held it at bay for all these years afterwards, as if it were a trained dog that might decide it wanted to bite again, after all.
Paul didn’t realize he was crying until he heard a tearful gasp leave his mouth. He slowly managed to get control of himself, realizing that his breathing was now the only breathing he could hear. He lifted his head up and looked to the frail shape of a man on the bed. There was no rise and fall of the chest, no raspy rattling of breath.
Roosevelt Gault was gone, taken away from this world less than twenty minutes after stumbling out of his bedroom. Paul stood and was grateful that his grandfather’s eyes were closed. Aside from the red in his cheeks, which was darker than ever now, it looked like he might have passed quite peacefully in his sleep. Paul pulled the covers up to his chin, leaned down, and kissed his grandfather on the forehead.
With that done, he wiped at the tears coursing down his face. He left the bedroom, closing the door behind him, and made his way back through the house. He went out of the front door and sat in the old folding chair on the front porch. He breathed in the early morning air, feeling the forests and the open air all around him. There, he wept and he planned, and he did not get out of the chair until well after dawn.
Chapter 31
Olivia and Joyce sat at Roosevelt’s table, eating scrambled eggs Paul had made. The smell of eggs and brewing coffee was what had finally brought Olivia out of the spare bedroom, though she had not slept at all after Roosevelt had gotten sick. When she came into the kitchen, Paul was nowhere to be seen, having apparently abandoned the kitchen after cooking breakfast. She checked the rest of the house and finally caught sight of him through the living room window. He was headed across the front yard, to the edge of the lawn, whe
re something lay on the ground, covered with a blanket. This made no real sense to her until she then noticed that Paul was carrying a shovel. She nearly went outside to offer her help, but Joyce came out of the bedroom at the same moment.
Not wanting Joyce to see what Paul was about to do, she quickly turned to the little girl and directed her into the kitchen. For the first time since waking up inside of the camper back on the George Washington Bridge, Joyce looked well-rested. According to Olivia’s phone when they sat down at the breakfast Paul had whipped up before heading outside to bury his grandfather, it was 8:00; Joyce had gotten around eleven hours of sleep.
Olivia was waiting for Joyce to ask about Roosevelt’s absence but so far, after twenty minutes of being awake, she had not mentioned it. Olivia wondered, in a very sad way, if Joyce sensed what had happened. Or, even worse, if she’d heard the sounds of the sickness taking him away last night. Olivia had certainly heard it, and she had bitten at her bottom lip to keep from crying the entire time.
“When we’re done eating, I think I’d like to go outside and pick some flowers,” Olivia said. “Would you like to do that with me?”
“Yeah,” Joyce said. She smiled, but there was little joy in her face or voice. She eyed Olivia cautiously and then asked: “Are they for Mr. Roosevelt?”
“Sort of.”
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” she asked. “Gone like my mommy?”
“Yes, sweetie,” Olivia said and didn’t even bother to wipe away the tear that trailed down the side of her face.
“Are we riding in the truck again?” Each question came in the rapid-fire way most kids are capable of. But Olivia did not think Joyce was doing it just to take in as much information as she could. She was likely doing it so her brain would not settle on each and every bit of sad news. She just wanted to get them updated, categorize them in her own mind, and carry on.
It Falls Apart Series | Book 1 | It Falls Apart Page 26