The Moment of Joy Before by Claudia O'Keefe
With "Maze of Trees"(Aug. 2005) and this new story, Claudia O'Keefe makes us wonder if her years of living in West Virginia were all just research. This new tale is a timely and harrowing vision that has some of the same frightening power to it that Ward Moore's "Lot"probably had in 1953: this could well be how it goes down. 
Ms. O'Keefe lives in New Mexico these days, where she works with the Institute for Space and Nuclear Power at the University of New Mexico. 
* * * *
Felice could never remember who the man was five minutes after he left. She could neither tell you his name nor describe his face. Was he tall or short? Fat or thin? Muscular or soft? What type of clothes did he wear? What were his politics? Or could he not care less what they did in Washington these days?
They talked. That much she knew. Each time he visited her crappy little log cabin outside Cherry Lick, she came away with the impression that they had talked for hours. He also preferred to visit her outside. He was adamant about it, always refusing her invitation to come indoors, one of the few memories it seemed she could keep. In the late spring, they sat on limestone boulders that ruined the pasture behind the cabin as a potential gardening space, misaligned gray rocks that erupted through the March violets and wild onions like impacted wisdom teeth. When summers came, she hauled out her pair of five-dollar camp chairs and they anchored them side by side in swells of waving grass, all the while trying to ignore the flies and stench of cow dung that wafted over her landlord's property. They stood sheltered under the bare, wet-black branches of her sugar maple in the fall, her boot toe trying unsuccessfully to push aside layer upon layer of sodden leaves to find bare ground where she could scratch a note to herself about him, just one word. Even in winter he made her stand out on her ice-slimed back porch while they conversed. He kept her shivering and captive for entire afternoons, so that when she found herself inside at last, with no recollection of coming in to warm her hands over her stove's only working coil, her fingers were white and bloodless from the tips down to the palms.
Each time she witnessed his arrival on the sloping gravel drive, she told herself that this time she would remember. She would save his name somewhere in her head, some place safe he couldn't pilfer. She'd paint the shape of his hands on the insides of her eyelids, sketch his eyes on her palm with one of her daughter's felt markers, like a student trying to crib a test.
Twice she found her clues, within minutes of his departure, but they were useless, as if she'd scribbled them while asleep and dreaming in that language that makes no sense upon waking. Her depiction of his eyes was equally baffling and disturbing. She'd drawn a pair of whirlpools, violent, watery tornadoes flying across her life and heart lines.
Felice had only two other vague pieces of information about the man. One, he was kind sometimes. Two, a vein of cruelty ran through him darker and thicker than in the richest Appalachian coal mine.
* * * *
"Are you in trouble, Mom?"her daughter Risa asked one afternoon when Felice picked her up after school.
"What?"Felice said. Looking at her daughter in the rearview mirror, she was unable to conceal her startled reaction. Risa sat in the back seat next to her friend, Sheila, to whom they were giving a ride home.
Light filtered out of the dull September sky like sun through old sheet plastic. It cast yellow reflections at the port wine stain on Risa's otherwise delicate left cheek, turning the birthmark orange. A little more than three months remained until Risa's thirteenth birthday. Though shades of gray emotion often eluded her daughter, as was to be expected with someone her age, she was highly intuitive about moods both black and deliriously bright coloring the world around her. She picked up on them immediately and never hesitated to question that world openly, even in front of strangers.
"No, honey."Felice laughed. "I'm fine."
She had no intention of telling Risa she sat behind the wheel in total dread because she'd run over a wooly-bear caterpillar on the drive here. Not just one caterpillar, but hundreds. Thousands of them. All crossing Hwy 382 going in the same direction, from west to east. For some reason it had made her think of her odd visitor and want to scream mindlessly.
Now, pulling out of the school parking lot and turning north again, she realized she'd have to drive over the bizarre phenomenon all over again.
Laboring up the road, the car crested the hill that marked the edge of the town where Risa went to junior high and the beginning of their fifty-minute drive back to Cherry Lick. Felice's foot hesitated on the gas pedal when confronted by the stain along the asphalt below, spreading clear to the first bend in the highway, black and inky red and creamy pus all mixed together.
The stain moved.
Risa frowned. "What is that?"
"Woolies,"Felice said. Unable to avoid them, her tires crushed the first wave of worms, fat as a little girl's pinky, but covered in fur as dense and appealing as a teddy bear's.
"Oh, God, yuck!"Sheila said, her face and hands pressed up against the window on her side of the car.
Sheila had refused to wear her seat belt and now Felice worried about the girl, who was her responsibility, somehow opening the door and falling out. She heard Risa unbuckle herself. Her daughter grabbed the front passenger's side seat and pulled her upper body over it to better see through the windshield.
"Sit back,"Felice warned them both. "Both of you buckle your seat belts. That's the last time I'm going to ask, Sheila."
Both girls ignored her. Her fingers clutched the wheel so hard her knuckles ached.
"Go around them,"Risa pleaded.
"How?"
Woolies, living and dead, covered the road from one side to the other.
A pickup truck skidded around the first curve, sliding on the remains of previously smashed caterpillars, while its tires threw up a spray of the newly crushed behind them, splattering their car's passenger window. Sheila jumped back reflexively, giggling in delighted fright.
"Stop, Mom."
Felice, wishing she could, did not apply the brake.
"Stop killing them, Mom!"Risa was frantic, her lips twisted and blotchy from biting down on them as she watched.
"I'm sorry, Risa."
This was their only route home, over miles and miles of the gentle creatures, whom Risa liked to pick up and cuddle in her hand each time she found one.
"I'm sorry."
An hour and a half later, drained and still upset, Felice dropped down on her daughter's bed and hugged the girl tightly. Risa resisted at first, but then finally relaxed in her mother's arms.
"Did you see that they were all black?"Risa asked.
"Yes."
"Do you know what that means?"
Wooly-bear caterpillars normally had black at both ends and a reddish-brown striped midsection. Folklore dictated that the narrower the brown stripe, the harsher the winter. Not one of the woolies whose lives she'd just extinguished had even had a brown stripe.
Her fingers pushed Risa's tousled hair out of her face, gently untangling the knots in it without feeling herself doing so. Her eyes grew unfocused. For a split second it felt as if her body was elsewhere.
Felice rocked in a bitter spring breeze, arms around her knees, drawn up on one of the boulders in the back pasture. She saw a man's hands. Strong, long-fingered, cleanly kept. Hands that blurred just a little as they moved, deft and never to be questioned. Hands of warning. 
"Winter's finally coming,"Felice said. "It comes from west to east, taking as many as the woolies gone. It's coming for everyone we love."
"Yes,"the girl agreed softly, not even questioning the ridiculous thing her mother had just said.
* * * *
Felice and Risa shared their dingy nineteenth-century cabin with Felice's mother, Karena. Both Felice and Karena had fallen on hard times financially during the late 1990s, so it was agreed that they would join together as a semi-extended family. They'd moved to the Virginia-West Virginia border from the Tucson area four years earlier, pushed out by the real estate boom that took everything beyond Section 8 housing out of their reach. Very few places in the U.S. remained unaffected by double-digit gains in housing prices at that time. Cherry Lick was one of them.
Karena hated the place. She hated that the nearest city with a bookstore was almost three hours away. She couldn't stand the winters, which she claimed lasted fourteen months of the year. In cold weather she complained loudly and often about the missing chinking between the cabin's heavy log walls, fallen out years ago and never replaced by their landlord, a sweet old hippie whose pot habit left him in a permanent fugue state. She told Felice that she missed her turquoise skies and tacky billboards with long-legged cowboys in neon cowboy hats selling "authentic Indian souvenirs"made in Pakistan.
Of all the things that drove her mother nuts, however, Felice knew she resented the Fundies here the most. Born and raised a firm believer in religious exploration vs. religious dogma, Karena felt herself drowning in a population who interpreted the Bible literally and supported what she saw as Washington's desire to conquer the Middle East in the name of Christ.
"Is this the twelfth century?"she'd ask. "Are we living through the Crusades?"
Felice couldn't say what made her decide on Cherry Lick. It wasn't their sort of town. Outsiders were always outsiders here, each of the families who surrounded their rented home having been on this land since before the two Virginias were separate states. She had to admit that the fervent pursuit of a Christian life dominated her neighbors' lives, socializing, work, schools, and politics. Sex, though it happened as readily here as any place else, was given a crust of sin too difficult to discard. She could go months without hearing someone make a joke that didn't begin or end with the words, "time to come to Jesus."
Curiously, she couldn't remember what her own religious leanings were, be they one of the many flavors of Christianity, anti-Christian, or outside that debate entirely. She felt fairly confident that she wasn't into Judaism, Hinduism, or the Muslim tradition, simply because she hadn't been raised as such. She knew she had once had very definite opinions about the order of the universe, but somewhere along the line a hole had appeared in her mind and into it those opinions plunged, never to be resurrected. Instead of trying to remember what her beliefs were, she fought to remember when and where she'd lost them. She thought it may have occurred slightly before she had packed her family into the car, hooked up a U-Haul trailer, and fled Arizona.
Fled him.
Not that it had done any good. He'd found her immediately, been waiting the day they moved in.
Rather than dwell on the downsides of her current home, Felice preferred the positives. Spring was glorious here, mostly because it followed winter. She didn't mind using a flashlight to navigate the living room, which sucked all the light out of the house even on the sunniest of days. Nor did the hundreds of thousands of spiders thriving in the cabin's crumbling timbers frighten her. She could flick them away when they crawled over her in the night. Cherry Lick's social isolation didn't bother Felice. She knew she had sought it out. She definitely didn't belong here, but then she'd never really belonged anywhere, even in her home town of Los Pios. Rather than feeling straitjacketed by this area's religious proclivities, she felt comforted living amongst people who let someone else tell them what was what when it came to spiritual matters. Rules were good. Rules meant emotional safety.
Unfortunately as life continued into October, with its harvest festivals and corn mazes, Day-Glo green plastic pumpkins giving way at the megacenter to an avalanche of resin Christmas trinkets before Halloween, while Risa underwent daily tweenie emergencies, discovering Sheila doing the dirty behind the FFA pig barn with the twelve-year-old hunk over whom she herself mooned, and Karena hid in her bedroom with a 2.5 liter bottle of Carlo Rossi Mountain Red, watching late night reruns of Hardball, Meet the Press, and The Capital Gang, Felice paced. She walked. She dreaded. She knew. She slogged through lakes of cow pies out back day after day, knowing her family had only a little while to go now. Just days until life changed and couldn't change back.
In the early morning hours of November 11th, Felice lay in a hypnagogic state, at the far threshold of sleep, the night's dreaming done. Or so she thought. Though she'd recently taken to sleeping with the three-way light bulb in her bedside lamp turned to its highest wattage, she could feel the dark outside, its mastery over her part of the world still unchallenged. Cobwebby frost lay over the pasture outside, paralyzing every growing thing, from the bent and rotted stems of summer's thistles to the copperheads that shut their eyes and felt themselves harden into knots, stored beneath the icy ground like so much frozen chicken.
She dreamt the type of dream that feels like real life, and in it her three-way bulb glowed darkroom red. Her sheets, damp with sweat, pooled around her, a slurry of blood pouring over bare legs. Above her dresser, the tiny, frameless mirror she'd found at a yard sale blinked crimson, reflecting an ambulance's revolving lights as they shone in through the window.
"What is it? What's happened?"she sat up and demanded.
Her mother stood at the foot of her bed. She was transparent. She looked happy and young, dressed in a suede mini-skirt and fringed leather vest from the early seventies, her hair an amber beehive of hairspray and Peter Max curlicues.
Oh, my God, Felice thought. She's dead. Her ghost was here to say good-bye.
"Mom?"
"I loved Arizona,"Karena said. "I loved where I grew up. T-bird convertibles and sunburn. The red rocks of Sedona. Why did we have to leave?"
Felice didn't know what to say to this.
"Something awful has happened,"Karena announced, then disappeared.
Felice opened her eyes, now truly awake. Her pulse coursed through the blood vessels in her ears, sounding like floodwaters trashing through a cave. Her lungs expanded painfully as she gasped in surprise.
Her mother wasn't dead. She sat watching Felice from the little chair by the window, looking every one of her sixty-six years. Her shoulders drooped, her cheeks were flush with an unhealthy excitement, her eyes completely resigned.
"God, you scared me,"Felice said. She told herself to calm down, breathe more slowly. She figured it must be close to three or four in the morning.
"What's wrong, Mom? Can't you sleep?"
"I think.... "Karena was uncertain. "You should come see CNN."
* * * *
The plague had begun.
World Health Organization experts figured the virus entered the U.S. in Seattle, on a jet from Indonesia carrying 435 of the first 500 to die. Only a small percentage of the passengers lived in the Puget Sound area or terminated their travel there. Of the 362 travelers who switched planes at SeaTac, the majority continued on to Chicago, Denver, and Tampa, but a single couple, whose final destination was Dayton, Ohio, proved potent enough as carriers of the disease to fell the passenger lists of three additional flights, each full to capacity. Seventy-two percent of those infected died within a week.
Dubbed the Tsunami Flu because it appeared to originate on a small, remote island flattened by the 2004 disaster, the pandemic confounded epidemiologists who decided early on that they were dealing with a brand new cousin to A(H5N1), better known as the avian flu. Once it was proved beyond doubt that the world was not dealing with bird flu, theories multiplied, among them that the waves devastating the island nation had set in motion a series of events that took years to unfold. Some said the Tsunami Flu had been around for nearly a century, but isolated until the waters made the tiny speck of rock in the Indian Ocean where it lay dormant unlivable, thus forcing survivors to migrate to larger population centers and carry the virus with them. Others contended that a certain animal species, perhaps wild pigs, weakened by the disaster and the destruction of their natural habitat, were transported on floating wreckage to unsuitable ecosystems where a previously low-grade strain of flu was encouraged to mutate into something fatal, then spread to humans.
Felice didn't care. She cared only that the virus came on fast and hard, the mortality rate highest among those younger than eight and over sixty years of age. It incubated and was infectious for far longer than the average flu, but severe symptoms didn't appear until the last stages of the disease, when fatal pneumonia flared up and killed patients within hours. Officials had kept news of the virus under wraps for nine days, badly underestimating how quickly and completely it was able to mushroom.
When CNN first broke the story, the media had no idea what was going on, only that hundreds of people had succumbed overnight to a mystery ailment that appeared without warning in several major metropolitan areas. People collapsed in dressing rooms at the mall, while hailing taxis, repairing downed power lines, or cruising up to the take-out window for a triple-decker combo.
Karena hugged her parka around her shoulders as she and Felice sat on the edge of Karena's bed, three feet from the TV. Outside, the temperature dropped into the teens. They didn't have enough blankets in the house. Felice noticed her mother shivering under the parka, but didn't feel the cold herself. Hypnotized by LIVE shots of ambulances backed up at emergency rooms, she watched frustrated EMTs waiting to unload their cargo, like limos mobbing the Kodak Theatre on Oscar night.
Footage of a frenzied mother attempting to carry her comatose teenage daughter into a trauma ward unaided played over and over in a continuous loop. Felice and her mother glanced up nervously at the ceiling. Risa slept in the room above.
"We're safe here,"Felice said, more to convince herself than her mother.
"You think?"Karena asked sarcastically. "I don't believe that for a second."
"Mom, there's a reason this place is the butt of every late night comedian's jokes. Cherry Lick didn't even have electricity until the sixties. We're lucky our telephone isn't on a party line. Risa told me her friends' kindergarten memories are of picking up the phone and listening in on their neighbors' conversations. We're forgotten back here, isolated."
"We have an interstate and a Wal-Mart. That's all this thing needs."
"The store!"Felice jumped to her feet, reached for her boots. "I should take what we have left in the bank and buy some extra food."
"And get yourself killed by terrified mobs?"Karena reached out and gripped Felice's wrist, fingernails biting into it.
"There aren't going to be any terrified mobs,"Felice said. "Not yet. If anyone's awake right now they're either watching wrestling reruns or the Weather Channel. No one is calling this a plague yet. I doubt the locals are bright enough to look at people dying five states away and think they could be next."
Her mother let go of Felice's arm and sighed deeply. "You know what's right. Go ahead if you think you have to."
"Would you rather starve two weeks from now?"
Karena's features hardened with suppressed anger and familiar fear, the fear that something would happen to Felice, leaving her alone. "You don't talk with the old farts at the post office like I do. If they aren't trying to drag you to a tent revival, they're retelling their family stories about 1918."
"World War I?"
"The Spanish Flu."Karena saw her daughter's blank look and snorted in frustration. "Killed fifty million worldwide, more than the bubonic plague? How many people in the city know about the pandemic of 1918? Hardly any. So little happens of consequence around here that what memories people do have become concentrated. Thousands died in these mountains. They remember it like it was yesterday."
"Which is why I should go now. While I still can."
"Fine. Go."
"Mom? Grandma?"Arms hugged to her chest from the chill, Risa stood in the doorway. Her slippers scuffed the old pine floor with each step as she headed toward the bed. "What are you fighting about?"
"I'm sorry we woke you, sweetie,"Felice said.
"We're not arguing, sweet pea,"Karena assured her.
"We have some breaking information,"said a voice from the television set. All three turned to listen. The tawny-haired man was CNN's top anchor. Disheveled after twelve hours on camera without a break, he looked little better than the unfortunates being hauled out of Denver's ambulances. "This just in. The CDC has confirmed the itinerary of Val and Judy Piets, the couple whose domestic flight from Seattle to their home in Dayton, Ohio, included connecting flights in Chicago and two other cities. CNN is being told that their two other stops were at Louisville, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia. No word yet on whether the couple disembarked for any length of time at either of those airports. As soon as we have that information...."
Felice sat down on the bed again, pulled Risa into her lap and crushed her protectively to her.
"We may already have it,"Karena said.
Felice's stomach soured. "I don't think so. Not yet. I've got to go get us what we're going to need."
She sent Risa back up to bed. She rose. She dressed.
She never left the driveway.
He stood waiting for her by the car.
* * * *
An hour after sunrise the phone rang. Fighting a mental fog that left her uncertain what she'd been doing moments before, Felice drifted into the kitchen to catch the call before the answering machine picked up. Risa sat calmly with one of their whitewashed flea market chairs faced away from the center of the room, staring through the multi-paned glass door to the back porch and watching something disappear into the woods. Her morning bowl of mini-wheats rested and wobbled on her legs, milk dripping unnoticed onto her pajamas.
Felice grabbed the receiver, while at the same time trying to see what mesmerized her daughter. Herds of deer were an everyday occurrence, flocks of wild turkeys less common. Rarely, they glimpsed the flame-red tail of a fox shooting by, or the monstrous, glorious form of a pileated woodpecker.
A black smudge, taller than it was wide, blighted the pasture, shrinking in size by the second as it traveled farther away. It bobbed up and down slightly like a person traveling over uneven ground, but Felice couldn't make out a head, arms, or legs. It was a shadow, walking like a human. Her breath sped up frantically as she prayed for the forest to hurry and swallow up the dark, smutty thing.
"Hello?"Felice said into the phone.
"Is this Risa's mom?"asked an unfamiliar voice.
Risa turned to look at Felice. Tears ran unhindered down her daughter's cheeks, the sides of her nose, around her mouth. Wetted by them, her birthmark darkened, the color grew more vivid, as if varnished.
"Mom?"
Not vacillating for a second, Felice dropped the phone. "Just a minute,"she said absently to the caller, but the receiver had already banged to the floor.
"Risa, what is it? Did you see it? What was that? Did it scare you?"
Risa, clinging to her mother, refused to speak.
Frowning, Felice gently pried herself free and picked up the phone again.
"Sorry,"she apologized. "Who is this?"
"This Risa's mom?"
"Yes."
"I'm Darla Heiney. Sheila Heiney's mom."
"Yes, of course."
"I'm guessin' you know by now about the plague."The woman was terse, matter of fact.
"They haven't labeled it--"
Darla Heiney rolled right over that. "We aren't waiting for them to close the schools. We're sending our children to safety."
"We? Sending them where?"
"The parents here, Cherry Lick. Jerry the bus driver's calling in sick and taking a load up to the old schoolhouse on Muddy Stump Mountain while they're still healthy. Peg'll look after them."
"Peg who?"
"Old school nurse, she and her boys has a camp next to the schoolhouse."
"How do we know they aren't infected?"
Darla's dull laugh sounded like lard choking a garbage disposal. "You don't know much about us, do you? Peg ain't been off that mountain in years. Clyde and Hubert only come down to ride the Rattler at the state fair, and that was back in August. They don't got it."
Felice's heart convulsed at the thought of sending Risa away with these hicks. Could strangers be trusted to keep her warm enough? Would they feed her anything remotely edible? What happened if Risa became ill? Felice wished she didn't have to go out into the world to make a living. She could simply keep her daughter home until the danger passed.
Darla interrupted the silence between them as if guessing her thoughts.
"Hon,"she said, "I don't really care what you decide. It's Sheila made me call. She's worried about her friend."
Risa's tears had evaporated, whatever she'd seen through the back door thrust aside once she intuited adults were talking about her.
"Mom--"she began.
Felice didn't hear the rest. Memories only hours old and already fading wormed their way back to the surface.
Her car keys dangling from slack fingers, the emergency run into town now a non-issue. Not a whisper of light fell from the night sky, the new moon not yet exited her womb, clouds obscuring every star. Yet she saw him clearly, the back of his head as he walked away from her. Hair black as clotted blood, each glassy strand sharp enough to cut naked flesh. 
"Felice."His voice crawled inside her ear on ticklish insect feet.
She shuddered. 
"I want her,"he said.
"Jerry will stop at the end of your drive an hour later than usual,"Darla said, bringing her back to the present. "He'll wait two minutes."
"Yes,"Felice said. "We'll be there."
* * * *
Wispy, goose-down snow swirled about mother and daughter as they stood just the other side of the icy cattle guard separating their drive from the road. They were located on a blind corner, the opening to their drive hidden by fir trees and wild hedgerows of leafless greenbrier.
Anxious that the bus driver might not see them and opt not to stop, Felice felt a soothing touch and looked down to find Risa's hand on her arm.
"Jerry can see me from here."
"Okay,"Felice said.
Pickup after pickup truck passed by, drivers nodding to them sadly. How many similar scenes had they witnessed along this road?
"God bless you,"an elderly farmer called to them as he cruised by, window rolled down despite the frigid temperature.
Felice stroked her daughter's hair. "You know I love you--"
"--a whole big bunch,"Risa finished the habitual phrase for her. "I love you, too, Mom."
"I'll come get you soon. I promise. We'll get your favorite quadruple fudge brownie at the mall in Roanoke. We'll get two of them, smash them together and make it octodruple fudge!"
Risa smiled, but didn't laugh. Even as a baby, Risa had been gifted with a beautiful laugh, never a giggle, but melodious, uninhibited laughter that made the air shiver and clear. Felice remembered the last time she'd heard it. When they still lived in Los Pios. Unlike a toddler's fierce attachment to her favorite blankey or a five-year-old's innocent belief in Santa Claus, something in Felice told her those joyous sounds should not have been allowed to lapse. Her daughter's beautiful laughter had been a language in itself. Her bilingual nature should not have been suppressed, even when the adults around her forced her to use only the tongue with which they felt comfortable.
Felice would give her life to hear her daughter laugh like that right now.
Jerry roared up the hill and around the sharp bend, his bus already overloaded with children. They sat dangerously high in seats piled with luggage. Backpacks and crates of food and an avalanche of sleeping bags filled the aisle. Spotting Risa and Felice, he hit the brakes, sending children tumbling off their perches to the floor.
"Sorry 'bout that,"Jerry said, when he opened the door. His hand trembled on the wheel. He wore a sterile paper face mask.
Perceiving Felice's alarm, he pulled down the mask in order to speak more clearly. "Don't worry. I ain't got it. It's made some of the parents feel more easy sending their kids off with me is all."
Felice nodded. She kissed Risa's forehead and held her close. Jerry would have to pry her away if he expected Risa to get on the bus.
"Ma'am,"he said.
Felice gazed up at him.
"Lots of kids to pick up. Lots more worried-sick parents. We've got a long way to go."
Felice nodded again and released her child, righted the heavy, adult-sized camping pack on Risa's shoulders, and gave her a gentle nudge toward the bus.
"Mom, guess what!"Risa pivoted suddenly on the step, her eyes strangely bright and out of character for this somber good-bye. "He spoke to me."
"What? Who spoke to you, honey?"Felice asked urgently. "What's his name?"
Risa started to answer, but Jerry pushed the lever to close the bus's hinged doors, putting glass and metal between them, and Felice couldn't read lips. The bus rumbled away in an explosion of grinding gears, diesel smoke, and burning oil, leaving Felice standing precariously on the cattle guard, the life drained out of her the farther Risa rode from their drive. She felt fragile, old, less of a person. She wanted to scream, knew she could because no one lived close enough to hear her. Instead, she turned and headed back down the drive, quiet, eyes growing hot with held back tears, not knowing what came next.
Sixteen hundred dead that evening. Twenty-three hundred by the next morning. Thirty-four thousand within two days. Two hundred and seventy-eight thousand by the following week. Neither of the Tsunami Piets, as the media began calling the married, ill-fated disease carriers from Ohio, had disembarked in Charleston. As Karena predicted, a Wal-Mart trucker stopping at the Covington store in Virginia brought it to those living on the border. Though nothing happened for more than twelve days, on the thirteenth day, the first cases of the flu cropped up along the Alleghenies, reaching into every hollow within an hour of the Interstate. Nor was the trucker the only source of transmission, just the first of hundreds infected to bring death to the Mid-Atlantic.
Rather than being safer, the Appalachian hills turned out to be one of the places with the highest per capita ratio of fatalities. Though those in high population centers had a greater chance of contracting the disease, after more than a million deaths in the U.S. it was thought the better, more readily available medical care in the cities gave victims an edge. Emergency production of medicines and an eventual vaccine would lead to a tapering off of deaths in the cities, the talking heads on MSNBC forecast. In the nation's poorest, most rural areas, however, that same help would be slow arriving and more difficult to distribute. Events were cancelled and most public buildings closed. Felice's boss called her and told her not to come in; the office would be shut down until further notice.
Days, then weeks went by without a single opportunity for Felice to speak with Risa. No phones, not even party lines, were installed atop Muddy Stump Mountain. Cell phone coverage was nonexistent more than a few miles from the Interstate. Who communicated with the old schoolhouse and how? Felice wanted to know. Her sole link to her child was the surly Darla Heiney, hardly a font of information.
"They's not hacking or coughing or wheezing or anything like that,"Darla told her over the phone.
"But have you heard anything about Risa?"Felice asked. "Has your daughter said anything to you about her? Is Risa scared? Is she homesick? Is she eating?"
"Hon, I just don't know,"Darla said. God, how Felice had come to hate Darla's "hon's.""They's not talking to us at all right now with the Tsunami spreading so much."
"Can you send a message? Can you get a message to her?"
"No!"Darla bawled into the phone, drawing out the word in that peculiar mountain way that mimicked a heifer giving birth at the bottom of a sink hole. "I done told you that before."
"But I don't even know where Muddy Stump Mountain is. No one will tell me and there aren't any maps of this area for sale. I've never lived any place where you couldn't buy a damn map!"
"You're not thinking of trying to get up there, are you?"Darla asked, "'cause the way things are right now, Clyde and Hubert will shoot you on sight if you get anywhere close, no questions asked."
"Are you telling me I can't go get my child if I want to?"Felice said.
"That's exactly what I'm tellin' you."
"You can't stop me."
"Maybe not me, but Hubert's twenty-gauge Mossberg sure can,"Darla said. "Felice, you're just going to have to put your trust in the Lord till this thing's over. Be strong in knowing that Jesus is looking out for her as we speak."
Apparently the savior wasn't looking out for Darla Heiney. She died the next morning.
* * * *
Cut off from even this feeble source of news about Risa, Felice moved into full-panic mode. She called the school again, hoping someone might have been left behind to field questions after it closed its doors. Now not even the answering machine in the front office picked up. She found the bus driver listed in the phone book with his address and raced to his house next to a rarely visited Civil War battlefield. His front door stood open, the place deserted. A litter of starving, flea-bloodied puppies abandoned by the family whined and tripped her up as she made her search of the home for clues to Risa's whereabouts. Nothing. Nor had a crumb been left in the house for the dogs. After filling an old enamel roaster with fresh water for the animals, the best she could do, she moved on, pounding on door after neighbor's door. No one answered. Cars sat in many of the drives, but she detected no movement in any of the houses. If the residents were home, they remained in hiding. She drove to the junior high. It proved a useless trip. A thick chain and industrial-sized lock put the place off limits. Officials hadn't even left information at the gate.
Her Chevette wound for hours along one-lane country roads, passing yard after yard of brown ice and toys forgotten in mid-play, but she saw no children. Her concern wasn't that she'd miss spotting the mountain schoolhouse amongst the leafless trees and hills so convoluted and covered in mud they were like dirty blankets piled in a laundry basket. What drove her to near madness was the unhelpful, unconcerned behavior of the people she did find to question. Judging by their accents they'd lived here for years, if not their entire lives, yet none confessed to having heard of the old school. They listened to her frantic, gradually more strident story, and shrugged.
Her gas gauge rode below "E"for more than twenty miles before she found a service station. Though it was only a little after three in the afternoon, dusk overpowered the winter-short day and blackened every hollow. Pulling up to the pump, she sighed in relief to see a light on inside. Digging into her purse for her wallet, she looked up, reached for the door handle, and found a shotgun barrel aimed at the spot between her eyes.
"Don't, ma'am,"said the station owner through the rolled-up car window.
"I just want some gas and a cup of coffee,"she said.
"No coffee. No food,"he said. "We got gas, but we's got new rules for the duration."
"All right."
"I'm going back into the store. I'm going to trust in the Lord that you is an honest person and will pay me for what gas you take. Leave the money inside that there tire over there."
He pointed at an old tire lying in the dirt next to the pump, filled with soil and the desiccated remains of last year's hollyhocks. His gaze never left her as he backed into the store as if she were the one with gun about to pull the trigger.
"Wait!"she called after him. "Do you know where--"
He shut his door quietly, yet firmly.
Felice followed instructions, filled her tank, paid, and drove home.
She didn't sleep that night, couldn't stop twisting and turning various scenarios over and over again in her mind, each involving Risa sick or in trouble and calling out for Mommy, who wouldn't answer, wouldn't come to her aid.
"How could you just let her go like that!"Karena said to Felice's back, as her daughter paced anxiously in the cave-like living room at dawn.
Felice turned to see Karena enter from the kitchen. With the morning sun at her back, her hair half-wild from sleep, and resentment she'd suppressed for days carving a look of fury into her features, her mother resembled a ship's figurehead cutting through the gloom. Felice felt that anger plowing toward her and cringed with guilt.
"How could you let them take her without knowing where they were going?"she asked.
"They did tell me where they were going. Muddy...."
Fear made it hard to focus. What am I going to do? How do I get her back? I don't have anyone to help me. I'm alone.
"Muddy Hump--"
"Muddy Stump Mountain,"her mother said. "For God's sake, you don't even remember the name of the place, let alone know how to get there. What kind of a mother are you?"
"A terrified one. Okay? I admit it,"Felice shouted. "I'm absolutely terrified we're never going to see Risa again. It was Jerry, the bus driver. It was the school bus that came to pick them up. Shouldn't you be able to trust a God-damned school bus? How was I supposed to know these frickin' people were totally disorganized? It was all happening so fast, the deaths, the thousands of deaths, the train wreck spread of this thing, the inevitability that it would come looking for us here. I figured everyone else was just as terrified as me. Jerry would rush our children off to safety and then be in touch with us immediately to let us know they were safe and what was happening to them. I don't understand the people in this place. I've tried to figure them out, what goes through their heads, but I don't get it. It's like they care about the sanctity of life, about others, about their children, but they don't care. They're like Darla Heiney, shrugging it off their backs and then dropping dead."
Felice felt as if she were physically coming apart. A thousand horrible emotions flooded through her, tumbling her about inside herself, dragging her under like an invisible riptide.
"I was afraid for her when I sent her off,"she said. "That's why I did it. I was afraid he'd get her."
"He? Who are you talking about?"
"The man, the person who's always visiting us."
"What man? Felice.... "Her mother reached out to her. "Do you have a fever?"
Felice pushed her mother's hand aside before she could lay it against her forehead.
"Don't touch me."
"Why, are you sick?"
"Yes."
Did she imagine it, or did her mother hesitate, retreat a step in self-preservation? A moment later, Felice glimpsed her mother's instant shame over a purely human reaction. Saw and forgave.
"Sick with worry,"Felice said.
"I'm sorry,"Karena said, softening her attitude. "I know you were just trying to protect Risa. I'm worried, too."
"Mom, I don't know what to do."
"We go look for her, is what."
"What do you think I did all of yesterday?"
"But you didn't have my connections."
Felice frowned. Had her mother been out where she could catch the flu? "What connections?"
"There's this old geezer at the post office. He hovers inside the door almost all day long. Now that they've discontinued counter service and the postmaster is no longer there, he doesn't have anyone to talk to. His mind is half-gone, but there's enough left that he recognizes me every day and keeps hitting on me. I'll ask him where they've taken Risa."
"But if he's as far gone as you say--"
"He's still got fingers,"Karena said. "He can point."
Hope, a small sliver of it, pushed through Felice's monologue of inner dread.
"I don't want you getting too close to him. Even yesterday, I did my best to stand a few feet away from people."She thought of the gas station owner. "Not that they would let me come near."
"Don't worry about me. Our biggest problem is what to do once we find the schoolhouse."
"What do you mean?"Felice asked.
"They're armed, aren't they?"
Felice thought for a minute, pacing again. "I wish I had a bullhorn."
"Signs,"her mother said.
"Big signs!"Felice agreed. "We won't drive up directly to the schoolhouse. We'll get just close enough for them to read our signs."
"Doesn't Risa have some white poster board in her room?"
Felice hugged her mother. "I'll get busy making them. You drive down to the post office and talk to this guy."
Karena grabbed the car keys.
"Remember, don't get too close,"Felice said.
She went to work, thankful her mother forgot to question her about the visitor. She regretted having blurted out what she did. It was as if by telling another person about him, it made him more than figment, gave him a life she dared not let him have.
Half an hour later, she capped the ultra-fat permanent marker, finished with the signs asking for her daughter's release, and suddenly realized her mother hadn't returned. Their post office was less than a mile away. It shouldn't have taken Karena this long to ask someone a simple question. Felice went to the front window and glanced uneasily up the drive. She gasped.
The top of their driveway was gone. Her mind tried to understand what she saw in its place, but refused. It recoiled at the total absence of reality it perceived, the hole in the world it saw just two hundred yards away. Whatever was there was literally beyond her comprehension. Unable to identify it, her brain filled in the gap with something more reasonable, the way human vision colors in the natural blind spot every person possesses by copying and pasting what surrounds it.
A black stain. A floating miasma that erased ground and gravel and cattle guard.
Everything in Felice tensed, came to a stop, her heart, her breath, her thoughts. The sight paralyzed her completely.
Intelligent, the thing reacted the moment Felice came to the window, as if it could see her, roiling swiftly down the drive toward the house.
"Stop."
Felice knew she had spoken, though she didn't feel her lips move, couldn't hear her heart beating or see her chest rise and fall.
The phenomenon slowed its progress and halted in place, consuming the empty parking spot in front of the house and the volunteer sumac shading it.
Her thoughts unlocked themselves long enough for hysteria to set in. What was that thing? What did it want? Had it hurt her mother? She knew in her soul that Karena needed her right now. Something horrid had or was about to happen. She had no car. Her mother had taken it, which meant she'd have to rush the mile to the post office on foot.
Past that. 
"Go away,"she said.
It didn't move.
"Please just go away."
It came closer, past the four-story fir tree where owls hooted at night, past sleeping forsythia bushes, over the ring of stones marking the bed where peonies and poison ivy flourished in late spring, around the front porch, halting only when it was in arm's reach of the window where Felice stood.
The wrongness of it swallowed everything. Incredulity struck Felice blind seconds before the stain formed fingers to touch the window glass inches from her face.
When her world finally came back to her, she discovered herself racing down the final quarter-mile to the main road. How had she gotten here? Had It put her here? Had she managed to get around it, through it?
Her throat burned, her body unaccustomed to exertion in the raw air, as she sprinted through a church parking lot and arrived at the post office. Parked in front, the Chevette's engine was still running, but no Karena. Instead, an elderly man dressed in a puffy silver jacket that belonged on someone sixty years his junior attempted to flag down a rusted-out minivan speeding by on the highway. It wouldn't stop and the man, drained by the effort, crumpled to the asphalt parking lot like a discarded ball of aluminum foil. As he fell, his arms wrapped around something at his feet.
"Mom!"Felice cried.
"This your Ma?"asked the man, who had only three teeth and smelled of moldy carpeting.
She nodded. He released his protective hold on Karena and crawled aside.
"She fell down,"he said.
"Felice?"Karena wheezed and clutched her chest. Her body shuddered. Her skin was tinged a cross between vein blue and shocky white. She labored to sit up and failed. "I can't breathe."
* * * *
Nine-one-one put her on hold with an estimated wait time of thirty-one minutes. Cherry Lick's local volunteer fire and rescue didn't answer their direct line. Karena tried but was already too weak to stand, let alone walk as her daughter assisted her to the car's passenger seat. Sweet, very sweet, though he knew the risks, the old man did his best to help, but mostly got in the way.
"You should stand back,"Felice told him. "I don't want you to get it."
"My son is dead,"he began, shaking his head. "I'm tired of winter."
Felice nodded her understanding and laid her hand lightly on his shoulder. It sagged beneath her palm. Though uncomfortable saying it because his sense of the divine was not her own, she wanted to give this man something to ease his pain. She smiled at him.
"God is standing right beside you,"she said. "I see him. His hand is on your other shoulder. He will be there when he brings your son to welcome you home."
The old man's lips trembled. "Thank you,"he said.
She climbed in behind the wheel, backed up and tore out of the parking lot as fast as the ancient hatchback would take mother and daughter toward the nearest hospital.
A National Guard roadblock barred her way half a mile from White Sulphur Springs.
"I'm sorry, ma'am,"the female soldier with bleach-fried hair and an M-16 rifle told her, after instructing her to roll down her window no more than a crack. Most of her face hid behind a mask that Felice guessed must have dated to the first Gulf War. "I can't let you pass. White Sulphur Springs, Lewisburg, and Ronceverte are under quarantine."
"Quarantine!"Felice cried. "The flu is everywhere."
"I know, ma'am."
"But I have to get my mother to the hospital."
"The hospital's full."
"The clinics?"
"Those resources have been deployed elsewhere."
Felice made a choking sound. "Deployed? Where? How do you deploy a building? This is an emergency! My mother needs immediate care."
"I understand, ma'am, but I can't let you pass."
Felice gazed beyond the military Hummers and barricades, attempting to see what went on farther down the road at the edge of White Sulphur.
"Don't even think about it,"the soldier said.
"Think about what?"Felice asked innocently, but knew her thoughts were transparent.
"We have all the roads, all of them. You can't get into town."
"My mother is.... "She didn't want to say dying, not when Karena could hear her and give up before they could find help. "My mother is extremely ill,"Felice begged.
For the first time since their encounter, the soldier bent down and looked into the car at Karena slumped in the passenger's seat, laboring to breathe. "I can see that, ma'am,"she said finally. "Here."Latex clad fingers pushed a slip of paper through the crack between window glass and door frame. It fluttered into Felice's lap. The phone number for a rural aide worker.
"They usually have Tamiflu and some of the other drugs. That's all I can do,"the woman said. "Now, please, if you'll turn around over there."
Felice turned and drove all of fifty feet to a pay phone. She dialed. The line picked up.
"Give me your address,"said a sour-sounding man on the other end of the line.
Felice hesitated, not knowing if she'd heard right.
"You're calling from the pay phone next to the Hardee's, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"What's your address?"
"Can I come to you?"
"No."
"My mother, it was so sudden. She wasn't showing any signs, but I'm scared. I think it's really bad."
"She's not alone,"the man said.
His cold, impersonal tone caught Felice by surprise. "No, you're not hearing me,"she said.
"No, you're not hearing me. Give me your address and go home. My wife will be there when she can."
A cold drizzle slicked the highway as Felice rushed toward Cherry Lick. It turned to hard rain once the barricade was out of sight and the wind picked up. As she passed Risa's school with its construction paper Thanksgiving turkeys still in the windows and the forlorn look of someplace that would never reopen, hail peppered the windshield. Icy rain came next, slashing at the trees, streaking by the side window like globs of frozen spit. Her tires shimmied on the curves. The road changed course and they charged into gale force winds where the spit became wet snow. The roads were eerie, untraveled by anyone except for a car heading the opposite way with an urgency Felice recognized.
Karena complained every moment of the way home, growing less lucid by the mile. Felice worried the freezing temperatures in the car exacerbated her rapidly deteriorating condition. Their heater was broken, but she cranked it on high anyway in hopes it would miraculously revive. Her mother coughed uncontrollably. Now that professional medical care proved to be out of reach, Felice cursed herself for making the decision to drive rather than go straight home and continue to call for help from there. Alarm settled in her chest and permanently altered the tempo of her heart. She couldn't get home quick enough, couldn't turn the wheel and slide and fishtail through this white crap mounting up on the roads fast enough.
Get Mom to warmth, she thought over and over again, concerned the aide worker would arrive at their cabin, find no one there, and pass them by. What's in the medicine cabinet? There's got to be something in there I can give her.
As she turned onto their road, it occurred to her that she hadn't seen their home since the stain had come. What would she find when she rounded that final bend? Would the top of the drive still be a black hole? Would there be a drop-off into nothingness where she normally parked the car? Would It be waiting for them? What had she been thinking to give the aide worker's husband this address? She could have lied and taken Karena to any number of empty houses she'd visited yesterday, the bus driver's place, for instance.
Five-inch drifts as coarse and sloppy as ice rink shavings covered the drive. No holes, no dark, boiling fog. Just snow and--she lifted her foot off the gas momentarily when she spotted them--tracks. Not knowing what to expect, she veered down their steep drive, obliterating the signs of human visitation leading to their porch.
A slight figure in a quilted pink coat she didn't recognize huddled against the door, taking shelter under the overhang. Hearing the car rattle over the cattle guard, the obviously miserable refugee looked up.
"Risa?"Felice whispered. She forgot to be careful in the snow and slammed on the brakes, barely able to keep the car from sliding sideways into the pasture.
"What?"Karena blinked. "Did you say Risa? Is she back?"
"Yes, Mom. Risa's back."
Yesterday she would have endured any torture, any loss to get her daughter back, see her running toward the car, made clumsy by the snow. Would have stomped on the parking brake, thrown open the door and gathered Risa in her arms in delirious reunion, swearing never to let her daughter go again.
Today, she honked the horn, beat on it several times until Risa got the message and stopped twenty feet from the car. Its headlights spotlighted her confused face through the heavy flakes falling between them, her nose and birthmark reddened by the cold, hands made blotchy by it. She was soaking wet from her sneakers up to her knees from hiking through drifts. The thin, unfamiliar coat could not have kept her warm on her journey.
Felice opened her window.
"Stay away!"she shouted. "Grandma's not feeling well."
"But, Mom--"
"No, Risa, stay back!"
"I couldn't find the spare key under the snow."
"Risa, listen to me. I'm going to turn off the engine and throw my keys to you."
Felice didn't know if she was already contagious, didn't know if objects could pass this disease to others, but didn't want to take the chance.
"I want you to take off one of your socks and put it over your hand."
"What?"Risa, expecting her mother to comfort her, not bark orders at her, began to cry in exhaustion and fear.
"It'll be okay, sweetie. Just do what I tell you."
"But, Mom--"
"No, listen to me!"she said. "Open the house, leave the keys in the lock, and go to the kitchen. I want you to make yourself some hot chocolate in the microwave and take it up the back stairs to your room. Change out of your wet clothes and get under every blanket you have. Do not come downstairs, no matter what you hear. As soon as I have Grandma settled in her room, I'll be up to see you."
Risa, ignoring everything she'd just said, started toward the car again. Felice laid on the horn and, eventually, her daughter grasped the seriousness of the situation.
"I love you, Risa,"Felice said. "I don't know how you got here, but I'm so glad."She lobbed the keys into the snow. "Now, go!"
* * * *
"You're lucky,"said Trina, the home aide worker, a fortyish woman with a New Jersey accent, sterile gloves, and a face mask tied so tightly around her head it creased her cheeks. "You're the last house I'll be able to visit tonight. If I don't start now, I don't think I'll make it home."
"Yes,"Felice said, "come in, please."
Felice gave the woman points for achieving the near impossible, finding their half-hidden drive in white-out conditions and having the guts to navigate down the driveway.
"Oh."Trina grunted thoughtlessly when she saw Karena. The look she gave Felice offered no hope whatsoever. "She has it."
After all she'd been through already, and the undignified struggle dragging her mom through the snow, scraping and bruising them both because she wasn't strong enough to carry her, tearing the medicine chest apart and throwing every last useless thing on the floor in her frantic search for something that could make Karena feel better, sitting by her bed and holding her hand and reassuring her again and again and again that medical help was on its way, would be here any second--to have this stranger come in and dismiss her chances so casually made Felice want to rip the woman's throat out.
"Please."Felice gestured for them to step into the next room. She spoke in a low voice. "You're going to tell me there's no chance for her and I don't want her to hear that."
"I can give you some OTC flu medications, Sudafed, Benadryl--"
"What?"Felice was stunned. "I thought you were going to bring us real help. The woman at the barricade said you carry Tamiflu."
"I'm not a doctor,"Trina said. "I'm not even a nurse. The rules don't allow aide workers here to dispense prescription medications."
"Rules! What do the rules matter now?"
"I'm sorry."
Trina dug into the bulging carry-all hanging from her shoulder and retrieved a package of non-prescription flu tablets.
Felice begged for the second time that day. "Please,"she said, forgetting to whisper, her voice steadily rising. "My mother is the only family my daughter and I have. We're all each other has. Please, you must have something else in that bag. My mother should be in a hospital right now."
Trina set the package of flu tablets on a table and stared at Felice for several seconds, undecided. Finally, she reached into the bag again and brought out a small, black book.
"A Bible?"Felice said.
"Our savior is the hope you're seeking right now,"Trina said.
From the other room, Karena burst into the conversation. "Does everyone here have to be a turd for Jesus?"
Felice's eyes widened and she felt herself blush.
"What?"Trina asked, as she ventured into Karena's room again.
Karena, hysterical at the onset of chronic pneumonia, fought the confines of her blankets. Every word she spoke came out like the moan of wind sucking rain through a bed sheet. "I said, does everyone here have to be a turd for Jesus?"
"Turd?"Felice forced her voice to be light. She didn't want her mom to drive this woman away before she could convince her to help. "You haven't been hanging out with Risa's friends, have you?"
Her mother wouldn't be jollied out of her anger. "Felice, what on Earth made you decide to bring us here? The moment we moved into this house, I knew it would be the last one I'd ever live in. I knew I'd die in Cherry Lick. I love you, Felice, but I'll always resent you for this. I just don't get it. Why here? This isn't your home. Christ, these people live, eat, breath Him. They're so obsessed with the Bible they fart and belch in scripture."
Clearly offended, but retaining her professionalism, the aide worker backed out of the bedroom. Sitting on the edge of her mother's bed, Felice looked over her shoulder at Trina. The woman appeared ready to bolt for home, but Felice put everything she could into communicating their need using her eyes alone. She had the feeling that behind her mask, the aide worker's lips pursed in a stern frown.
At last Trina nodded and the corners of her eyes softened in a smile, one Felice felt certain was pity.
"God bless your family,"she said. A moment later, the front door clicked shut.
Felice rose to turn the lock and saw it, a small, brown paper sack next to the package of OTC flu remedy. She opened it and peered inside at two sample packs of prescription medicine, the type doctors often gave to their patients as free trials.
She dosed Karena immediately, then sat in the chair next to her mother's bed, with the phone to her ear, on hold with 911 for another hour before she gave up. Upstairs, Risa would be lying frightened in her bed. Karena's anger had eased after she received her medicine. Felice knew she should go up and reassure her daughter, yet when she started to leave, she noticed her mother's gaze searching timidly about the room.
"Mom?"
Karena didn't answer, showed no signs that she heard Felice. Her eyes grew weepy and red around the rims. Gone was the confident, outspoken woman.
"Mom? What is it? What can I get for you?"
Felice didn't really need to ask. She could see it in Karena's eyes. Only one look had that type of desperation. Her mom wanted her own mother, long dead.
"I want to go home,"Karena stated.
"I know,"Felice said, softly stroking her mother's damp brow.
"Back to Los Pios."
"Home,"Felice nodded and said.
"I miss it so much."
"Get well!"Felice said, her own eyes hot, ready to spill over. "Get well and I promise you I'll get us home. I will."
* * * *
"Mom?"Risa called to her from her bedroom.
"I'll be up there in a minute,"Felice told her. "Did you do what I said? Are you warm?"
"Yes, Mom, but there's something I have to--"
Felice couldn't handle things a moment longer. She needed escape.
"In a minute, sweetie."
She rushed out the back door, not even stopping to put on a coat.
Snow blew under the porch eaves. It frosted the old slatted swing, which gyrated wildly in the wind, suspended by twin lengths of chain. Felice paced up and down the narrow portion of decking free of drifts. Flakes landed in her eyes and melted in her tears. She'd never felt guilt this heavy. What possessed her to bring her family here? Her mother was among the seventy-two percent. She would die tonight without seeing home ever again. More than anything, she wished she could make this hideous form of death easier for her.
Though she'd told Risa she'd be only a minute, she paced until her energy ran out and her feet stumbled. Uncaring that the wind and snow plastered her back, she brushed off the porch swing's painted slats and collapsed into it. Her weight calmed its fierce movements and she stared out into the back pasture. Snow made the wind visible. Its currents and whirlpools, tossing and thrashing, a stormy sea not normally seen, hypnotized her. Her emotionally exhausted mind groped for understanding, the reason for all of this, the reason for everything. What was the black stain and why did it come here? Why couldn't she remember her mysterious visitor the moment he left? Who was he?
"Felice,"he'd said. "I want her."
Finally, the cold and wet penetrated her overexcited, overheated body. Dusk encroached, turning the storm midnight blue. She realized she had to go in. Half-blinded by the snow, she almost missed the tiny spot of red under the barren sugar maple.
Curious, she shielded her eyes and descended the steps, then punched through the drifts toward the shelter of the tree, where the snow was only a couple of inches deep.
At first she thought they were plastic, blown here across the miles from the cemetery in town, where wreaths of fake flowers adorned nearly every grave. Then she crouched down and touched the poppy-like petals. Each blossom had a black spot at the center in the shape of a three-pointed star. She dug snow away from the slender olive-green stems and discovered that they were firmly rooted in the earth. Her mind wouldn't accept what she'd found.
How? she asked herself. "How?"she said aloud.
The small cluster of desert wildflowers didn't belong here. Native to Western Arizona, they did not grow in winter, Felice knew, nor east of New Mexico. In fact, there was only one place she'd ever seen this particular strain.
Blast after blast of wind flattened the blossoms to the ground, but not a petal was lost. In wonder, Felice picked them, protected them in her arms, ran up the steps, through the back door, and into her mother's bedroom.
Two startled heads popped up, when she rushed into the room.
"Risa!"Felice said.
Chair pulled up to the bed, her daughter sat with her upper body lying across her grandmother's bedcovers, gently hugging her. She jerked upright at Felice's entrance.
Alarm Felice imagined would assault her system only during the last moments of her own life, crushed the breath from her lungs. Adrenaline lit her nerve endings painfully on fire.
"Oh, Risa!"
"Mom, you don't have to worry."
"Risa, leave."
"No, Mom."
Felice approached the bed, still clutching her haphazard bouquet of wildflowers.
"Please, for me, honey. It may not be too late."
Karena's glassy eyes fixed instantly on the flowers in her daughter's hands and lit up in pure joy.
"Mariposa lilies,"she said. A feeble hand reached for the gift her daughter brought her. "Is it spring already?"
Felice cupped her mother's hands around the bunch of lilies and assisted her in lifting them toward her face. Her mother attempted to gather their warm, dusty perfume into her nose. Though Felice knew she couldn't possibly smell anything in her condition, Karena pretended the fragrance was magnificent. She sighed and her fingers petted the blossom's large, soft petals as she smiled up at her daughter.
"Thank you for keeping your promise, Felice. Thank you for taking me home."
"Los Pios,"Felice whispered to her and touched her hand.
"Los Pios."
Her mother sighed again, closing her eyes.
* * * *
"Why, Risa?"Felice asked when the two stood in the living room together, allowing Karena some fitful sleep. "You're exposed now."
"Mom, I've already got it."
"No!"Felice denied it. "You're not sick."
"I've been trying to tell you, but you won't listen."
"How did you even get here?"
"Mom, listen to me!"Risa almost shouted.
Felice steered her daughter into the kitchen so she wouldn't agitate Karena.
"They all have it up on Muddy Stump."
"What? How? They weren't supposed to let anyone near the schoolhouse. They wouldn't let me near it. Wouldn't even tell me where it was. I drove around for hours looking for you."
"Sheila snuck out to see her brother,"Risa said.
Felice thought about her last conversation with Sheila's mom, Darla Heiney, the news the following morning.
"Sheila's mom is dead,"Felice said.
"So is Sheila. So are half the kids at the school. Sheila gave it to all of us. When that old lady and her two sons who were guarding us died, a bunch of us got in their trucks and got out of there."
"Drove?"
"Don't be so shocked, Mom. The girl who drove me home was about to go for her learner's permit when Sue hit."
"Sue?"
"Duh. Short for Tsunami."
"Risa, this thing doesn't infect everyone automatically. You shouldn't have gone into your grandmother's room. You shouldn't be near me without protection. Go get one of those painter's masks from the tool box in the furnace closet and put it on."
Risa shrugged. "But, Mom--"
"Do it!"
Felice waited until Risa headed toward the storage room at the back of the house, then returned to her mother's room. She halted one step inside the door.
He stood at Karena's side.
His lips were beautiful.
His hands, exquisitely carved in flesh and bone and skin flawless as alabaster, spoke of a will no one on Earth could resist. His cruel posture dismissed everything and everyone because whatever anyone wanted truly didn't matter. His hair might have been sharp as prison wire and the icy hue of a meteor shower in mid-winter, but his lips couldn't hide what he thought sometimes.
Sorrow, genuine and final.
"I'm sorry,"they whispered.
Why is he in my house? Felice wondered dully. He's always refused to come indoors.
"You said you wanted her,"she said. "Why did you want my mother?"
This isn't memory. This is now. I'm seeing him now. 
"I can see you changing, Felice,"he said. "You aren't quite forgetting, but you aren't remembering. Time is short."
She tried to force herself to look into his eyes, but she couldn't move her gaze above those terrifying, seductive lips.
"Whatever you have left to do to prepare, you must hurry."
If she looked into his eyes she would know everything and everything would be lost. She had to forget again.
During the precious seconds she wasted thinking this, he placed his hand over Karena's heart. One moment her mother was there, living in agony. The next, an empty husk grew still and sank deeper into the mattress. Felice saw nothing, no light, no mist, no ghostly apparition. She sobbed at the lack of what her expectations told her she should experience when her mother left her. She'd had no time. She hadn't had the chance to prepare.
Though he didn't actually touch her as he passed her, his aura, the black stain, brushed her cheek and she glimpsed a thousand happy memories, a thousand ugly ones, her entire life compressed into a single sensation, one sound, a mixture of rushing water and sun shining on dreaming eyelids, and the half-life of the human body decaying one cell at a time, day by day.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour later, she still hadn't forgotten his visit.
* * * *
She closed her mother's door quietly, as if any noise, however slight, might disturb her.
Outside, the worst happened: snow changed to heavy sleet. Icy pellets, identical in size to coarse sand, poured from sky to roof as if from a dump truck loaded with twenty tons of the stuff. They scoured the shingles, hissed down the drainpipes, and overflowed the gutters, cascaded from eaves and overhangs into great piles. Atop the eight-inch drifts already on the ground, even an additional two inches of sleet would make shoveling by hand difficult, if not impossible. Whenever this had happened in the past it always froze rock-hard afterwards, trapping them for days.
No one else would be coming tonight, nor tomorrow. No one to comfort or assist them, no one to take Karena away. Felice knew she had to protect her daughter from the smell now seeping through the house. Even if she could have managed the dead weight, Felice couldn't bear to put Karena out into the storm. Opening the bedroom window, then closing the door on her mother was the only option she had.
Risa waited nervously in the hall, wearing her mask.
"Grandma?"she asked.
Felice smiled a smile that wasn't one. "She's peaceful now."
"She's dead?"
"Yes."
Felice wasn't certain what reaction she should expect from Risa--tears, anger, accusations, disbelief. Instead, her daughter bobbed her head numbly in acceptance, turned and climbed the stairs to her room.
"Risa?"
"I'm okay."
Felice knew for a fact that she wasn't, Risa's fatalistic attitude upsetting her more than the blame for which she had braced.
It's okay. I'm going to die. You're going to die. We're all going to die, her daughter's eyes said.
She had to do something. She had to turn this around immediately.
She scrubbed herself raw in a hot shower, put on fresh clothes, then found a second mask in the furnace closet. Food for Risa came next. Scrounging in the refrigerator, she considered making her daughter's favorite soup, French onion, but ultimately decided on a warming, yet nondescript vegetable instead. If Risa ate French onion now, she would hate it forever, always reminded of her grandmother's death when it crossed her lips. She baked biscuits to go with the soup, slathered them in butter and jam and placed everything on a tray.
Risa's room was terrifyingly neat. She'd picked up everything off of her floor and thrown away the trash, changed her bed linens, arranged stuffed animals, slipped papers and odds and ends into drawers, stacked and sorted books into two piles, those belonging to the public library and her school. Most frightening of all was the clothes basket on the floor next to her dresser. Not only had she swept every piece of dirty clothing into the basket, she'd lined it with a thirty-gallon trash bag.
Felice's throat tightened. That a twelve-year-old would think of this, prepare like this, undid her.
"Are you okay, Mom?"Risa asked from the bed where she sat stiffly upright.
"Sure,"she said. She placed the tray across her daughter's lap. "I brought you some soup."
"I don't want to eat."
"I think you should. Scoot over. I'll sit next to you and we'll watch some TV."
Risa gave her control of the remote. She flipped through the channels, finding more than half had gone off the air. With the exception of a few news networks, snowy static replaced any channel or program requiring live or recently recorded content. Eventually she found a cheesy romance flick on a station that appeared to be computer automated rather than manned by living persons, and made no mention of the plague.
"I'm scared for you, Mom,"Risa surprised her by saying forty minutes into the movie. "I don't want you to be all alone."
"Honey, you're not going to die. You're not even showing symptoms. Even if you got it, I know you'd survive."
"How do you know? Grandma died so quick."
"Grandma was older. This flu strikes older people the hardest. Older people and the very young. Now, I know you're not eligible for social security, are you?"
Risa giggled.
"And you're not a little girl anymore. You're almost thirteen."
"Tomorrow,"Risa said with evident pride.
Oh, God. Her birthday's tomorrow. The special birthday. 
"That's right. Tomorrow. And I have something special planned."
She had no such thing. With all that had happened, she'd forgotten. It seemed ghoulish to even think of celebrating, but kids had a different reality from adults.
Risa choked softly and suddenly rubbed her neck.
"What is it? Did you swallow something the wrong way?"
"My throat hurts,"Risa said.
* * * *
She vomited the soup and biscuits within the hour. By midnight she had a fever. Karena hadn't lived long enough to use much of the prescription meds, so Felice, hoping it might help if she was aggressive from the start, gave Risa a double dose. She got on the phone with 911 again, which this time didn't even answer, let alone put her on hold. Children's grape-flavored expectorant initially quieted the cough Risa developed around two-thirty in the morning, but less than thirty minutes later it was back, and Felice heard it working its way down into her bronchial tubes and finally her lungs.
I will not lose her. I won't, Felice promised herself over and over through the night, while she phoned Trina, the health department, ambulance companies, the pharmacy at the megacenter, every doctor in their meager rural phone book, seeking help or even advice. Yes, it was the middle of the night, but given the times, she expected at least one phone to be answered by a live person.
At dawn, the sun rose shrouded behind weather dark as a funeral veil. Fifteen hours and still the sleet continued, entombing them in a foot-and-a-half of solid ice. Piles topping twice that height lay in front of the windows and doors. Almost no light reached the ground. Instinctively, Felice glanced toward the drive, but couldn't see it through the gloom, anticipating, steeling herself for the fight she knew lay ahead. She had no hope.
Karena had struggled to breathe, Risa didn't. Karena's soul, her person had wrestled with the confines of a body that sought to smother her, wanting out, wanting freedom. Risa's did not. Her figure lay limp beneath the covers, hair slick with perspiration, lips blue from lack of oxygen. She choked on every breath, no longer having the energy to cough. The only movement came when she clawed ineffectually at her chest. A bloody, wadded tissue fell from her fingers.
"Happy Birthday, sleepyhead,"Felice said.
Risa's eyelids, pained slits, worked to open all the way.
"Hi."
Felice carried a zippered plastic bag, printed with mod pink and orange flowers.
Risa saw the pouch.
"What's that?"
"A present for someone who's all grown up."
Makeup was all Risa had talked about this last year, when she would be allowed to wear it. Since the age of ten, she'd requested foundation to cover her birthmark, plus the mascara and lip gloss she swore--with a straight face--that the other girls wore.
Felice unzipped the pouch, removed astringent towelettes, a bottle of moisturizer, and another of foundation. All were hers, but they'd work well enough to make her daughter happy now, when time was so precious.
"Shall I give you a makeover?"
"Yes, please."
Felice hated putting anything on those pale yet perfect cheeks. Her daughter's cryptic beauty needed no enhancement. Like most girls her age, however, she equated artifice with sophistication, and the drive for sophistication was every thirteen-year-old's secret aspiration.
Covertly wiping away blood and spittle from the corners of her daughter's mouth, Felice dotted beige liquid on forehead, chin, nose, and--
"Not the birthmark, Mommy."
"Are you sure?"
At that moment a bead of sweat rolled into Felice's right eye from her browline. Something that felt like a lead butterfly contorted, then drowned in her lungs. Dizziness rocked her from side to side. She couldn't suppress a hacking cough that labored to clear her throat of mucus that quivered and unexpectedly blocked her airway.
"I'm sure,"Risa said. "He has to know I love it."
"He?"
If Risa answered, Felice didn't hear it. She put a hand to her temple, instinctively trying to squelch the throbbing that began there.
No. Please not yet. I have to help my baby. 
She fumbled through the rest of the makeover, worried that the weakness infecting her so suddenly would result in a heavy-handed job too close to makeup on a corpse.
When she held the mirror up to her child's face, however, something glorious happened. Her daughter's color came back, her eyes brightened, and she laughed, that unaffected music that was uniquely Risa. For just a moment, Felice glimpsed the joyful adult her daughter was meant to be.
"It's been so long since I heard you laugh like that,"Felice said.
"Thanks, Mom. I'm gorgeous."
"Yes, you are,"she said, and passed out.
* * * *
He was bent over her daughter when Felice woke. The ends of his long, black hair tickled Risa's throat. His fingers lovingly caressed the side of her chin, still baby soft.
"No,"Felice cried. "You can't have her. She's mine. She belongs in this world."
"In my world, now,"he said. "She's thirteen. That was our agreement."
He lowered those exquisite lips to Risa's cheek, the one with the mark laid on her since birth. Odd, why had she never noticed it before? Her birthmark took the shape of a partial kiss. The instant lips met cheek, the kiss completed itself, then disappeared into Risa's face.
She opened her eyes.
"Daddy!"she whispered.
"I'm here, little dove."
"I'm afraid. I can't breathe anymore."
"I know,"he said. "Time to come home with me."
"No, please,"Felice said. "I love her so much. I need her."
For the first time she found the strength of will to look up into his eyes.
At once she knew everything, and everything was lost.
* * * *
"Wake up, Felice. It's time to stop dreaming your human dreams."
"You took her,"Felice accused, unable to fight the weight of eyelids that no longer responded.
"I didn't make you choose the place where sickness would be the worst."
"You're Death,"she said.
"And you are The Moment of Joy Before,"he told her. "It's time to stop pretending. To see with your real eyes again, so thousands need not suffer each day you forget."
But hadn't she suffered, too?
"I've missed you, my love. I need you. Our daughter needs you."
No. No one needed her. She was all alone now in the cabin in Cherry Lick.
"Wake!"he ordered.
Felice got up. She sat up through her cooling skin, through her face and those dead eyelids, shrugging off hideously rigid muscle and disgusting, congealing flesh.
He laid the fingers of one hand against her face and moved her so she was forced to meet his eyes.
They were kind. They hungered. She knew the man who lived within them.
"I am Eternity. I am Love. I am your Last Dream,"he said, "Come to me."
On the other side of the door, the sun broke free of its black veil, just in time to set. Sleet became snow once again. Slanted, late daylight transmuted snowflakes from ice white to gold, sunlight given mass that soothed her fevered cheeks.
She took his hand.