A Single Light

by Tosca Lee

  “My sister used to work here,” she finally says. “Her and another nurse. When they got sick, I took down the sign, told everyone the office closed down. That they shipped everything off to the one in Kearney.”

  I stare, trying to reconcile the idea of a closet full of meds going to waste in the middle of a crisis.

  She lifts her chin. “Oh, spare me. You should be thanking me!”

  “For what?” I ask, wondering if she’s insane.

  “Havin’ the medicine you need to save your friend. You’re welcome,” she says sarcastically.

  “We appreciate it,” Chase says. “Do you know anywhere in town we could also find some gas?”

  She laughs. “Sure. Just go up to the Store-More and ask nicely. I’m sure Elcannon would be glad to give you some.”

  I narrow my eyes.

  Plaid Man comes back, something in his hand. A laminated card of some kind.

  “This is what you need,” he says, and tosses it to Chase, who catches it.

  It’s some kind of ID badge for a Josh Lowell.

  The top reads GREAT PLAINS HEALTH.

  The hospital.

  “I don’t understand,” Chase says. “The hospital doesn’t have any medicine anymore.”

  Plaid Man sniffs and wipes his nose. “It’s there.”

  Chase turns it over. The handwriting is barely legible.

  “At the hospital,” I say slowly.

  Plaid Man nods toward the ID badge. “We took care of him for a while. When we started running low, he said not to worry, he had access to all this stuff. Things were getting so bad, no one was paying attention like they used to. Until he got caught.”

  “If he got caught they would have cleaned out his locker.”

  “It’s not in his locker. It’s in the base of a lamp in the staff room.” He pauses. “Or in a sofa cushion or above a ceiling tile. He wasn’t right before he died.”

  I stare. “Seriously?”

  “Do we look like we’re joking?” the woman snaps.

  “Sorry,” Chase says, and tosses the name tag on the desk. “This isn’t gonna happen.”

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  “The place is a crazy colony!”

  She jerks her head to the door. “Show ’em!”

  “What antibiotic are you looking for?” Plaid Man says.

  “Piperacillin-something or vancomycin,” I say.

  Plaid Man pulls something from his pocket. Two small glass jars with metal tops.

  My heart stutters as he studies the labels and then holds one out, toward me. He takes a couple steps closer. Just enough so that I can read the label.

  VANCOMYCIN

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Chase murmurs.

  It’s all I can do not to launch myself at Plaid Man, the room having shrunk to that single glass jar.

  “How many of those do you have?” I ask.

  “More than this,” he says.

  “Prove it.”

  He hesitates, and then walks back out.

  I look toward the window as though judging the time. But I’m straining to listen.

  Again, murmured voices. A door shuts farther down the hall.

  Plaid Man comes back with a box and three bottles in one hand. He tosses the box on the desk.

  Surgical masks. A few pairs of gloves.

  He turns the bottles in his hands. Holds them up, two in one hand, one in the other, for me to see. Shakes them slightly so I can see the white powder inside.

  “We have IV equipment for it, too,” he says.

  I bet they do.

  I glance at Chase as though asking if we can get a puppy. Not for my benefit, but for theirs. Because (a) I have every intention of possessing those bottles one way or another in the next hour, and (b) as desperate as I am, they are, too.

  “That’s all you see till we get ours,” the woman says and waves the gun toward the window.

  “What if we can’t find it?” I ask.

  “Then your friend dies.”

  7:30 P.M.

  * * *

  Chase paces behind a professional building two blocks away, the box of masks on the ground between us.

  “No,” he says. “No way.”

  The cicadas are out again and the smell of smoke and garbage—or burning garbage—is thicker than it was before, irritating my eyes and throat.

  “I have to,” I say. “There’s no other choice.”

  “There’s infinite other choices than you going into a hospital looking for something that isn’t there just because a bunch of addicts want you to produce white magic pills from out of nowhere! I’m telling you, that stash doesn’t even exist. ‘Oh, it’s in the lamp. I mean the ceiling. Or the sofa . . .’ ”

  “What if it is? I go, get the pills, we trade for the antibiotics.”

  And then there’s the small technical issue of getting a working car and fuel.

  “Wynter, addicts will say anything to get what they want. They were keeping him supplied! I promise you, if we don’t show up in the next twenty-four hours, one of them will go to the hospital looking for it themselves, knowing just as well as we do that it probably doesn’t exist. Because that’s what junkies do.”

  “How do you know so much about addicts?” I demand.

  His brows draw together. “Because my sister’s one.”

  I blink. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugs. “She couldn’t cope with our sister Natalie’s death. I lived with her for a while before I moved to Ohio. Saw what was going on. The family finally gave her an ultimatum, she went to rehab, got clean. Decided to move to France to start over.”

  So that’s why his parents were visiting her when the pandemic started.

  “I had no idea,” I say.

  His eyes plead with me. “Please don’t think I kept this from you. It’s just never come up.”

  “I know,” I say, and mean it.

  “Thank you,” he says, looking relieved. “So what do we do?”

  “If there’s any chance the pills are in the hospital, it’s worth a shot.”

  “No, it isn’t. A house with two corpses who can’t sneeze on you is one thing. A hospital full of live infected is another. And even if you are immune, you’re talking about locking yourself in a building full of crazy people. You could get mauled. Bludgeoned to death. Raped. Strang—”

  “I get the picture.”

  “The only way you go in is with me.”

  “No. Out of the question.”

  “Then that plan is out.”

  But all I can think about is those three glass bottles that have cost us so much—too much—already.

  We have less than twenty-four hours to get back and no guaranteed transportation but our own feet.

  “So what, then?” I demand.

  He glances around. “We find it in one of these houses.”

  I stare at him.

  “Didn’t you hear back there? They’ve already been systematically cleaned out by Elcannon!”

  He shakes his head. “Unless his guys are addicts, they probably didn’t find half the pills stashed in those homes.”

  “Some of them probably are. I may be naïve, but I’m pretty sure those are not the only addicts in town,” I say, pointing back to the VNA office. “Besides, why would an addict leave anything behind?”

  “Because they got so sick they forgot where they stashed their stuff.”

  “You mean like the guy with the drugs at the hospital.”

  “No! That guy was lying.”

  “How do you know?” I raise my palms. “It doesn’t matter. We could spend days looking for hidden drugs in houses and not find any.”

  “Okay. Then I wait till tonight and go back to the VNA.”

  “You think they won’t be prepared for that? Did you see how paranoid she was? Besides, they had a gun!”

  “I think I can disarm an addict in withdrawal.”

  “You don’t know how many guns they have,” I say.


  “What do you want me to do?” he shouts, throwing his arms wide. “I know you love Julie! I know you can’t bear the thought of wondering your entire life if you could have done something to save her like you do about your mom. But I love you. And some things just cannot be controlled by an act on your part. Including the fact that she might already be dead.”

  “I am not treating this like a compulsion!” I say angrily.

  Am I?

  “I’m not saying you are. What I am saying is no one person can save the world!”

  He reaches for me. Seems to choose his words carefully as he holds my hands between his own. “Look. Would I stand by and watch you risk your life for Truly or Lauren? Yes. Absolutely. I’d do it with you. Would do it for you, if you’d let me. But Julie wouldn’t want or ask this of you. Not at the risk of you losing both her and the girls. At some point you have to realize that the thing you may need to do for her is be there for her daughter.”

  Staring into his eyes, I know he’s right.

  But what he doesn’t know is that it isn’t just Julie.

  I can’t face Lauren knowing I promised to keep her mother alive. I couldn’t face her then, knowing she’d already given up.

  And if I don’t get back in time, I might not get to face her at all.

  “I say we give it an hour,” he says. “If we don’t find anything, we figure out how to get back. The longer we take, the less it’s going to matter whether we get those antibiotics or not.”

  I nod, but an hour is exactly sixty minutes too long.

  8 P.M.

  * * *

  I flip one cabinet open after another as Chase pushes aside the pantry’s folding door in the fourth house we’ve come to since he found a crowbar in a toolshed.

  We’ve searched under dresser drawers, floorboards, and mattresses, inside furniture cushions, behind sofas, attic access panels, and even the crevices in floors for anything resembling a pill.

  We’ve come up with a stash of pornos, a kid’s time capsule, a set of unsigned divorce papers, and a can of mushroom pieces sitting right on the shelf that even looters didn’t want. Also, a set of his and hers battery-operated stick-on lights pried out of a bookshelf that work just fine as flashlights.

  No drugs. No guns—just a gun lockbox with its door pried off the hinges and a fire safe with chisel marks and blowtorch burns.

  Chase goes to the mudroom as I start yanking open drawers, pausing briefly to rummage through one filled with junk and pens. I pull out a plastic Hello Kitty watch that still works. Buckle it on as a punch—no, kick—slams into what sounds like the washer. Again, and again.

  I know the feeling. Have had to tamp down desperation just enough over the last half hour to keep from choking on it.

  Chase comes out, hands in his hair. “Safe’s been drilled. It’s like someone systematically . . .”

  He goes still. Looks at me.

  “That girl said Elcannon kept a bunch of stuff at the sheriff’s office for his guards. The one at the hospital was armed. I thought he was just a gang leader. But if they’ve taken over the city . . .” He shakes his head like he’s an idiot. “I’ve got to get into the sheriff’s office.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Wynter, I can’t. Do. Anything,” he says, “without a gun. I can’t get the medicine. I can’t get a vehicle.”

  “What’s this ‘I’ stuff?”

  “Okay, we need at least one gun. And we know where they are.”

  “We don’t know how many guys are in there,” I say. “And even if we get in, you think he’s going to have the stuff just sitting by the front door? It’s a jail. He’s got the stuff locked in the cells! Or—wherever they keep evidence or whatever. I guarantee you, he doesn’t leave the keys with anyone there. He goes there every day because he’s the only one who has them.”

  I have no way of knowing if this is actually true, though it makes enough sense, at least, for Chase to turn away with a curse.

  “You’re right,” I say. “They have to have missed something somewhere. I remember Julie talking about how, when they moved into their house in Naperville, they found a plastic bag full of sex toys in the crawl space under the garage.”

  Chase gives me a weird look, pulls the stick-on light from his pocket, and heads down to the basement.

  The instant I hear him open a door somewhere below, I grab a Sharpie from the drawer and swiftly write on the white tile counter:

  C,

  Went to hospital. I’m sorry.

  Do NOT come inside after me.

  I need you to let me out.

  Will be at door—

  I glance at the watch.

  —at 8:37.

  W.

  I pocket the pen, slip out the back door and through the neighbor’s yard.

  And then I’m running down the street.

  8:07 P.M.

  * * *

  I turn west at the Runza restaurant to get off Jeffers, the main street through town, which I’ve realized becomes the bypass. Jog past homes I would have liked to admire in another life, with their gables and big front porches, having wanted nothing else for Mom, Jackie, and me when I was a kid.

  Over half of their doors are spray-painted with Xs like dead cartoon eyes. The E painted on the brick or siding beside it. Sometimes the garage. They look like nothing so much as giant caskets to me now. The smaller brick ones too much like the little houses in graveyards with dead bodies inside them.

  It feels good to run, to unleash the fear I’ve been trying to ignore for hours, to burn panic like jet fuel, sneakers pounding the pavement.

  I’ve always been prone to earworms. I heard one of Jackie’s friends play a classical song on the piano once when I was six and have carried the rhythm around with me for years. Tapping it out on my desk at school, walking to it toward Percepta Hall in the Enclave, falling asleep to it at night.

  But it’s Julie’s words that play on a loop in my head as I tug my mask down to my neck, breathing the warm June air while I sprint down Vine Street.

  Desperate people do crazy things.

  I beat them out on the pavement a syllable at a time.

  Des-per-ate-peo-ple-do-cra-zy-things

  I know I’m being watched. I see the curtain move in more than one window.

  I hear the truck before I see it, rumbling down the cross street behind me. I dart over the curb to the old oak slowly dislodging the sidewalk and press myself behind it, breathing hard. Step around the trunk as the vehicle rumbles on, catching sight of the American flag on the fender.

  Must be a slow night at Exit 177.

  I move toward the street corner. Peer around the front porch of a house.

  “He ain’t a good person,” a voice says both above and be-

  hind me.

  I whirl around to face a figure sitting in the shadows. An old man, I think at first—no, a woman—slumped into a wicker chair as though her body was melded to it.

  “Pardon?” I say.

  “He’s like a radioactive spill that turns people into monsters. Makes one almost want to get all this over with.”

  “All what over with?”

  “The end of the world. When everything dies after all the good is gone. So it can start over pure.”

  I wait for the sick twist of my stomach. For the old anxiety to send my pulse racing—faster than it was when I was sprinting down the street.

  “This isn’t the end of the world,” I say as the truck finally turns.

  I jog to the end of the block. Turn right and cut through several yards to come out on Willow.

  A sound echoes down the street behind me.

  No, a voice.

  “Wynter!”

  I glance back and find Chase a block away, his face white as he bolts right for me.

  I put my head down and run. Turn at the corner, breathless, following the signs to the ER entrance past ambulance bays and windows retrofitted with boards and bars, drum barrels lining the roof. Navigate garbage bags
and torn tents, cars like animals ridden to the ground. I pull my mask up over my nose and mouth.

  There—the yellow plastic wind block outside the entrance, the guard standing outside it to the left. He’s got the same ventilator dust mask and automatic rifle as Elcannon. I slow at the last second and start to walk. He turns when he sees me, weapon raised. And it occurs to me that when I told Chase to let me out in thirty minutes I never considered how he’d get me past the guard.

  “Don’t come any closer,” the guard says. The entire entrance is plastered with weathered warnings like the one Chase brought to the car the other night.

  “I need to get in,” I say, out of breath.

  His brows draw together.

  “You got an order?”

  “What?”

  “A note ordering you to report to the hospital.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “There’s no time.”

  “Okay. This”—he gestures to the entrance behind him—“is for sick people,” he says, as though I obviously don’t understand. “Not regular sick people. The crazies.”

  “I know.”

  He glances at my forehead, my cheeks.

  I’m sweating, flushed from running.

  He looks away, like he’s about to say something against his better judgment. “Don’t you want to get checked out first or something?” he finally says, voice low, “Isn’t this your job?” I say. “To let me in?”

  “Are you armed?” he says.

  “No.”

  He looks at my overalls. Motions for me to turn around and put my hands out.

  I comply, bracing myself, but he’s quick, efficient, and obviously baffled.

  “Look, are you from here?” he asks when I turn back around.

  I hesitate. “Does that matter?”

  “You might be more comfortable in the privacy of your own home, is all I’m saying.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  He gestures toward the direction I just came from. “There’s houses all up and down the street! Pick one with an X on it!”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Lady, once you go in there, that door locks behind you. No one will let you out, including me, no matter how much you scream. No matter what happens. There is no food, and barely any water. You will die inside there. If there’s any chance you don’t have the disease now, you will within hours.”