Sarah nodded. She knew what had happened out there; Adam had told the others that Chuck had been shot and killed by bandits. He didn’t like lying, but he wasn’t sure how they’d react to the story that Chuck had been a cold-blooded killer. He knew Freddie was suspicious of the story.
“You know I can’t have children,” she said.
“I wouldn’t think-”
“No,” she cut him off, lest he misinterpret her meaning, think it was a ledge he could talk her down from. She could just picture him trying to stretch his “life is precious” argument to the next step, to a place where he’d want to get busy with the business of making little Fishers. “I mean I physically cannot have them. I had a hysterectomy.”
It didn’t surprise him, but he said nothing. Because there was nothing to say.
“I figured the best thing I could do is make sure that any child of mine wasn’t doomed to my fate. Even if that meant not having the child at all. And after watching what Caroline had to go through, I’m not sure I’d even want to chance it.”
“I’m not asking you to marry me because I’m clinging to some traditional notion of family,” he said. “I’m asking you to marry me because I want you to know what you mean to me. How much I love you. Thing is, this could be a transitional world for a while. Who knows how long before we figure our shit out, if we get a chance to figure it out at all. I want you to know that the way I feel about you isn’t transitional. It’s for keeps.”
The last walls inside her broke down, and she couldn’t say no. Nothing, not a goddamn thing was guaranteed for any of them. And that had been the sole basis for her resistance. She felt a smile break across her face, a lightness spread through her, as refreshing as the spray of ocean on a hot summer day.
“Yes,” she said, feeling her eyes well up with tears. She felt stupid crying, but then she saw tears in Adam’s eyes, and she forgave herself. She never in a million years believed she would let herself fall for anyone again, let alone follow a path as traditional as marriage, but here she was all the same. She embraced him, wrapping her arms around him tightly and covering his face in kisses.
“And how do you propose, forgive the pun, we do this? I’m not sure a marriage certificate is required anymore.”
“We’ll do it however we want to do it. We’ll ask Gwen to perform the ceremony.”
A question came to mind, and it embarrassed her to think about it, and so she asked it before she had a chance to change her mind.
“Do you want me to take your last name?”
He paused, and his lips pursed in the way that let her know he was really thinking this one through.
“What do you think?”
She clicked her tongue.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My name is important to me. And I get the feeling it’s going to be tough for women to maintain their identity.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re bigger, stronger, faster,” she said. “Women are going to have a tough time in this brave new world.”
“Then don’t,” Adam said. “We can rewrite the rules.”
“You sure?”
He laughed.
“Of course I’m sure.”
She smiled and kissed him.
#
Two days later, Adam and Sarah stood at the center of the park, across from town hall, before Gwen Townsend and most of the residents of Evergreen. It was a chilly day, but warm in the sun.
“Good morning,” Townsend started, her hands clasped, “we gather here today to watch our two friends take their first step on a long and happy life together.”
Sarah squeezed Adam’s hand; the others did not know about her diagnosis. Someday, they would know, but for now, it was best to put it up on a dark shelf, out of sight, and out of mind.
“I’ve officiated many marriages in my day,” she said. “But this one is especially special to me. We’ve all seen so many terrible things in the last few months, and we’re liable to see many more. We’ve all experienced incomprehensible tragedy. The special Dateline episode about us would be a two-nighter for sure.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd.
“And the future is anything but certain,” she said, her voice darkening a shade. “I wish I could stand here and tell you that everything will be just fine. But I don’t know that. And I think we all heard enough lies during the epidemic that for me to stand here and sugarcoat things insults you and tramples on the thing we are doing here today.
“I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I do know this: today, love has prevailed.”
Claps and hollers from the audience.
“Love has shined its bright light on this dark land. It shows us that there are still beautiful things in this world, things worth fighting for.”
More cheers, the sounds rolling across the plains.
“Tragedy is temporary. Pain fades away. But love endures. And as long as that is the case, we have a responsibility to keep fighting for a good and just world where love can continue to shine.”
She stopped, tears in her eyes, and hugged Adam and Sarah.
Behind them, Adam heard throats clearing and noses sniffle. She could certainly lay it on thick; he supposed that’s what politicians did. Still, he couldn’t help but smile as he held Sarah’s hands in his own, studied every line of her mocha-colored face. She wore jeans and a thick blue sweater; he was casually dressed as well, as they had agreed to dispense with the pomp and circumstance and focus on each other and their friends. Her hair was pulled back and curled up in a bun, revealing her slender neck. He could make out a vein just under the skin, pulsing rapidly. He stroked her hand gently and as he did so, he could see her pulse slow. That’s what he wanted to do for her, be a source of peace for her, be the safe harbor for her as she was for him.
He couldn’t make the world’s problems disappear any more than he could cure her Huntington’s. But they could love each other for as long as they could. And maybe that love could make the world around them a little better. It made sense in a weird sort of way. With so few of them left, their actions had greater impact on those around them. Each act, from good to wicked, would be amplified. Life was more precious, love more rare, evil more pernicious, every death more terrible. This, he decided, would be their legacy for the generations he hoped would one day follow.
He felt her hand squeeze his, and he broke free from his trance. Sarah and the mayor were staring at him.
“Not having second thoughts, are you, cowboy?” Sarah whispered.
“You wish,” he said.
She made a face, sticking her tongue out at him.
“Adam Fisher,” Gwen Townsend said, “do you promise to love and cherish Sarah for as long as you both shall live?”
“I sure do.”
“Sarah Wells, do you promise to love and cherish Adam for as long as you both shall live?”
“As long as I live.”
“Then I pronounce you husband and wife.”
As they leaned in to kiss, the crowd absolutely exploded with joy, their cheers and hoots rolling across the park, echoing through the quiet town, up and down the streets and alleys. For that briefest of moments, the pain and suffering of the previous four months faded away, like a blistering sunburn cooled by the tangy chill of aloe.
#
They retired to the town hall for a small reception for Adam and Sarah. Two tables of snacks had been set up, courtesy of Charlotte and Donna Tanner. They’d even managed to find matching paper tablecloths peppered with the words Congratulations and Good Luck! Miriam apologized for not making a cake, but her large pyramid of sugar cookies looked lovely just the same.
A receiving line took shape, and Adam and Sarah visited with each guest, one at a time, thanking them for being there. Sarah tensed when they reached Freddie.
“Congratulations,” Freddie said, shaking Adam’s hand first and nodding toward Sarah.
“Thank you, Freddie,” Adam said.
Freddie didn
’t say anything else, and a brief silence began to morph into an awkward one, so Sarah leaned in and hugged the big man. She even pecked him on the cheek for good measure, and she tried to ignore the tension in his jaw, the way his teeth were clenched together.
“Thank you, Freddie,” Sarah echoed. “And thank you for all you’ve done for us. You helped us all get here. Helped keep us safe.”
“I did what I could,” Freddie said, his voice barely a whisper.
“It was a lot,” Sarah said. She was starting to feel uncomfortable, so she placed her hand on Adam’s elbow and gave him a slight shove toward the next guest in the line. Caroline’s face hung in the silence among them like a large painting.
When the last guest had hugged the happy couple, Charlotte plugged in a boombox and music filled the autumn night. As the first song, a Fleetwood Mac tune, erupted from the speakers, the guests froze and stared at the music player as though it had come to life. In a way, it had. Sarah could see it in their eyes and in their sad smiles, the dead world that had birthed them into this new one. No one danced or spoke or even sang along; they stood there like mannequins as the song played through.
Charlotte played a slow song next, by the presumably late Alison Krauss. As Krauss’ slinky voice slipped out of the speakers, Sarah felt Adam taking her hand and leading her to the center of the room. It had been cleared of chairs, now a proper spot for a couple’s first dance as husband and wife. His arm snaked around her waist and she laced her hands at the back of his head. And they danced, in the center of a circle formed by their fellow citizens, their friends, these good people they hadn’t known a month ago and, in a better world, would never have met at all.
As the song wound down, she found it difficult to believe that she was married (to whatever extent marriage existed now), and she found herself wishing her father had been here to see it. He had always pushed her to live her life to the fullest; he would tell her that she was only getting one life, so she might as well take chances with it. Part of her had wanted to hate him and her late mother for having her at all, for taking such a terrible risk that they would have a Huntington’s baby. But she couldn’t hate them. And so she had done as her father had advised. But this, even this would have surprised her old man. She thought he would have been pleasantly surprised. She thought he would have liked Adam.
When it was over, she kissed Adam hard, and he lifted her off the ground. The guests whooped and hollered again, even more loudly than they had during the ceremony.
“Speech, speech!” someone called out, but the cheers and whistles continued.
Adam stepped forward and patted the air with his hands, trying to silence the crowd.
“How about we have ourselves a party?”
The crowd roared, and that was enough.
The party continued long into the night, stretching into the wee hours of the next morning. Adam danced with every lady; Sarah took the hand of every fellow. No one wanted to leave, and so no one did. They sang songs and got drunk on cheap beer and champagne. Someone led the motley crew in a series of ever more ribald rugby chants. As night crested and rounded the turn for daybreak, they got louder and sillier. Sarah saw at least two couples pair off for drunken make-out sessions in the corners.
At dawn, they poured out of town hall and into the chilly morning, their laughs and voices growing hoarse and strained. They streamed toward the center of the park, where they huddled together and watched the sun break over the rooftops, spilling its golden light into the town. Reddish clouds striated the morning sky.
“Pretty sky,” someone said.
“Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning,” another replied.
“That’s an old wives’ tale.”
“Could be. But eight years in the Navy, never wrong once.”
This hushed the crowd a bit, and together they looked at the red sky, the scalloped clouds, and although she’d heard the red sky admonition too, even Sarah wondered how such a lovely scene could be a harbinger of bad weather. She thought this even as she felt her right hand twitch.
It twitched a second time, spasming and locking in place for a moment as though it had a mind of its own; then the attack withered and her hand drooped back down. That was the second time in the past week she’d experienced the twitching in her hand.
Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning.
As Adam pulled her close and kissed the side of her head, she covered her right hand with her left, the way a family might hide the drug-addict uncle. This had been a long time coming, since she’d gotten the positive test while she’d been stationed at Fort Lewis near Tacoma. The genetic disease specialist had given her a thick sheaf of literature on Huntington’s, glossy, high production value, written in that corporate-speak that almost made it sound like she’d been granted membership in a super exclusive club. She went home and read it and cried for two days.
The Army had never known about her disease because she’d had the test done on her own dime; she didn’t want to chance getting discharged, especially since she could be years away from showing symptoms. They didn’t test for it on the annual physical, and so she’d served another seven years, good ones, too, during which she was awarded two Purple Hearts and the Silver Star. The Star was for a little episode in the Kandahar Province in Afghanistan, where, she well and truly hoped, that forsaken patch of useless ground, the rock formations like broken teeth jutting from a shattered jaw, was littered with the bodies of Medusa-ravaged Taliban thugs.
But now all that was in the past, really in the past, because if the plague had closed the chapter on her life as a soldier, the appearance of symptoms would serve to close the book on the life she’d once known, a life of strength and good health and not needing a damn soul for anything.
Because now, it was here. It was as if the Huntington’s had simply tapped the Medusa virus on the shoulder.
I got this.
CHAPTER FORTY
Freddie left the reception around one in the morning. He’d wanted to leave hours earlier, but he had to keep up appearances. He’d handled the loss to Adam badly, he knew that, and it was important to show the others there were no hard feelings. As he let himself into his apartment, he could hear the party still going strong. He lay on top of his comforter in the dark, a hand under his head, but sleep eluded him.
No matter.
Freddie himself had remained sober, nursing a beer all night so at least he wouldn’t look out of place. The weight of cumulative events were beginning to press down on him, choke him, so heavy that sometimes he found it hard to breathe. He got up at three-thirty and sat at his kitchen table.
He could just leave.
That was definitely an option.
He could pack his bags and hit the open road. He could go anywhere. South to the Gulf Coast or Florida or even Mexico. Anywhere he wouldn’t have to worry about cold weather. But while those destinations might work now, in December, he couldn’t imagine living that close to the equator in the summer months with no air conditioning. Summers in Baton Rouge had been bad enough, even with his little window unit rattling along. It would be an oven now. And the bodies. What had the last three months done to the millions of corpses dotting the landscape down there? How bad would it smell? Eventually, it might be an option, maybe a year from now, once there was nothing left but the bones. But now? Yeesh.
Perhaps to the northwest, Oregon or Washington? He’d liked both states when his football travels had taken him there. A lot of land for a man to get lost in. No more worries about backstabbing doctors or sad-sack pregnant women or whiny kids who would never know how truly lucky they were. Just Freddie and the land. Hundreds of well-stocked cabins, isolated, minimal body count, lakes rippling with fish, woods rustling with game.
Now that did sound good.
And maybe it would be good a month or so out of the year.
But it didn’t scratch his itch.
He couldn’t live the rest of his days by himself. He was thirty-three years o
ld, and decades of isolation just wasn’t singing to him. He’d lived his life around people, in front of thousands of fans, in the trenches of sport with dozens of like-minded men. He could play crowds like a concert violinist; he led his teammates like a field general. As he went, so went the team.
In the end, Freddie decided to stay. Everything he wanted was here.
He left his apartment at mid-morning. He pedaled west along Route 815, not wanting to draw attention with the sound of his truck. The weather was cool, but not cold. Thin clouds ran west to east, and there was a slight breeze, as there always seemed to be. This part of Oklahoma had a far more temperate climate than he’d expected; according to the local almanac, the average daytime temperature, even in the dead of winter, climbed into the upper forties.
Evergreen was dead quiet, the citizens sleeping off what was sure to be wicked hangovers. They’d need the whole day to sleep off the effects of the piss-water beer and champagne that they’d used to fuel the wedding festivities. Duties would be shirked today, no doubt, heads under pillows, night tables stocked with bottled water and painkillers to combat the stinking headaches in their futures.
Beyond the Evergreen town limits, the land was absolutely desolate, flat and peppered with scrub brush erupting from the ground like boils. Farther west, Freddie could make out the outline of Oklahoma’s highest peak, the Black Mesa, the source of the winds that powered Evergreen’s turbines. He’d been meaning to check it out, but he hadn’t made the trip yet. The power plant lay a mile away.
The NorthStar Wind and Solar Plant sat on about two hundred acres of Oklahoma grassland, with about two-thirds of the land devoted to the wind turbines and the solar panel field occupying the rest. The solar field consisted of dozens of rectangular panels rippling brilliance in the morning sun, with a two-hundred-foot tower that concentrated the heat absorbed by the panels. Beyond the panels were two large salt tanks, which stored the heat, and the conduits that carried the heat into a series of generators that converted it into electricity. The wind farm was set back some, the turbines rising up majestically like a giant’s handheld fans. The blades of these three-hundred-foot-tall monoliths rotated slowly, filling the air with a strange but not entirely unpleasant hum.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 39