“Jubal, I need blankets.” Fiona was next to him. She looked calm but serious.
“Why do you need-”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but everybody saw you close the door, and I can see your face. I’ve known you a long time, Jubal Slate. It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Okay.” She ran a hand over her mouth. Jubal had seen her father make the same gesture many times. “Okay. You can tell me later. Right now I want the blankets in your trunk.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the sickest person I’ve ever seen and she’s laying on dusty blacktop while half the town-the half that isn’t sick-gets to stand around and watch. I have to do something.”
“Fiona, no. What she has, it’s catching.”
Fiona handed him a pair of surgical gloves. He saw that she wore a pair herself.
“We’re not the kind of people who stand around and watch. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
He swallowed. “I’m marrying one tough broad,” he said.
“You bet your ass. Now open your trunk.” She turned to the dozen or so people who were still milling around. “Taylor, Red. Get over here.”
Two middle-aged men shuf?ed over to Fiona.
Jubal dug the blankets out of the trunk. “We carrying her to the drug store?”
“And do what? Take her off the street and lay her on linoleum? Uh-uh. Put her on those blankets and put her in your car. We’ll take her to my house.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She tossed him the box of surgical gloves and walked back to Rite-Aid.
“Here,” he said. He handed the box to Taylor and Red.
“Jubal, I got a bad back,” Red said.
“And she looks mighty bad,” Taylor said.
“Put on the gloves,” Jubal Slate said, “or as God is my witness, I’ll shoot your dicks off.” To press home his point, he rested his hand on his holster.
The two men slipped on the thin gloves in record time.
“The rest of you people, go about your business.”
They stared back at him; some with tears rolling down their cheeks.
“Are we all going to die, Jubal?” Billy said, barely able to get the words out through his constricted throat.
“What? No! We aren’t going to die. People get sick all the time, sometimes lots of them all at once. That doesn’t mean they’re going to die. Or that you’re going to get sick. Or you other people here.”
I just handed that boy a?ne line of major bullshit; I’m going to Hell now, for sure.
“Now everybody just…go about your business while we take care of this sick woman.”
No one moved.
Red and Taylor, standing next to the cruiser, held the woman stretched out between them. Red had her arms and Taylor had her legs. They looked at Jubal pleadingly for help with the door.
“C’mon! Let’s go.” Jubal clapped his hands at the milling people, who?nally walked away with many a backward glance at Jubal and the sick woman. Some of them looked extremely upset; some looked stunned.
“Jubal,” Red said, wincing.
Jubal sighed. “What is it?”
“One of this lady’s pimples popped all over my rubber glove.”
“Christ, hold on while I open the back door and lay the blankets out, then you guys can set her in the cruiser.”
With looks of disgust on their faces, the two men hurriedly positioned the woman in the back seat so that she sat straight up. Then Red and Taylor backed way-fast, holding their hands away from their bodies.
After being released, the woman toppled over onto the seat.
“Okay, you two sissies. Go ahead and take a breath now.”
“Are we?nished here, Jubal?” Taylor whined. “My wife is waiting for me at home, and I’d sure like to get these contaminated gloves off.”
“Yeah, you two get out of here.”
They both walked off at a brisk pace yet slowly enough so it didn’t appear they were running away.
Jubal slammed the back door of the cruiser as Fiona came out of the Rite-Aid.
“All closed up?”
“Yes,” she said, jingling her keys in the front door lock. “Meet me back at my place?”
“See you there.”
Jubal got into his cruiser and took off toward Fiona’s house-soon to be his own, too, after the wedding. She lived in a small tangle of a neighborhood on the south side of Serenity. Many of the town’s older citizens lived there, too-Pops Perez for example-and Fiona liked to visit and help them when they needed it. They all loved Fiona and were always cooking dinners for her-and Jubal, too, when he was visiting.
Jubal wrinkled his nose. What in God’s name was that smell-like something had died? It had to be the woman in the back seat. Maybe, in her delirious state, she’d shit herself. Jubal hoped she hadn’t gotten any on the seat, then chastised himself for being so sel?sh.
The woman moaned as if to let Jubal know she was still kicking.
Man, he’d smelled better aromas on road-kill duty, which he had to perform on the town’s back roads.
Jubal rolled down the windows of the car. Too bad if it was two hundred degrees outside; he couldn’t stand much more of that god-awful smell.
Then the woman’s words came back to haunt him…
Dead army.
He couldn’t get that phrase out of his head no matter how hard he tried; it worried his thoughts like a dog at a tasty bone. Maybe he was wrong, but he could have sworn that’s what the woman had said back there at the car wash: dead army. He wondered again what she had meant. Had she seen US soldiers die of this strange sickness, or from some other type of terrible accident? God, he hoped not.
And then there was the drunken ambulance dispatcher, who had told him everyone for hundreds of miles around was a victim of the sickness, too.
It was a goddamn epidemic.
Jubal wiped sweat from his brow with his stained shirtsleeve.
As the deputy drove his car through town toward his?ancee’s, the blazing sun began to descend along its arc.
He wondered what color the sunset would be this evening.
Much later, back at his mother’s house, Jubal slowly swung the front door open, stepped inside and closed it.
His mother snored on the couch in the same spot he’d left her earlier this afternoon. The Navajo comforter was still pulled up to her neck.
He wanted to turn on the wall-TV and?ip channels to see if there were any updates on the situation, but the remote control was gripped tightly in his mother’s hand, and he did not want to wake her. He would have to use the TV on his bedroom computer.
The room dimmed as night fell.
He stretched, lifting his arms; his back popped. He rotated his head on his stiff neck. For a man of 22 years, he felt three times as old; the day’s events had taken a lot out of him, with his trip to Fiona’s being the last straw. He’d had to carry that sick woman all by himself into his?ancee’s house, exploding boils, road-kill stench and all.
He still wished Fiona hadn’t asked for the woman to be brought there. What if Fiona caught the illness? He didn’t know what he’d do if something bad happened to her, and right before their planned wedding day. But that was just the way his sweetie was: a caring, nurturing type.
“Festus?”
Man, she must really be out of it.
