The truck stopped alongside an alfalfa field where something big had feasted. Nimkii! But she didn’t see him. The tracker on her phone took her into the field, signaling something close, and she knew what she’d find even before she saw it. She sat in the truck and considered not even bothering. No, this was going to hurt, but she needed to do it. She got out and walked what seemed like uncountable steps, and there lay the radio bracelet on the ground. It must have fallen off.
She picked it up. It smelled a little like him. He had to be nearby.
“Nimkii!” she called. “Nimkii! I’m here.” Pachyderms had great hearing, a range of miles. She followed his tracks into a woods alongside the river and lost the trail. She called in every direction. Her voice grew hoarse.
Her phone rang. It was Avril, looking washed and rested. “How are you?”
“I can’t find Nimkii.”
“Oh, no. What happened?”
She told her, and even a shortened version of the story seemed sadder when it was explained out loud. Avril let her talk about Nimkii, her hopes for him and how futile it all seemed now—how empty central Wisconsin felt. She didn’t say how she blamed herself for dithering instead of leaving a long time ago. Nothing she had done had made much difference.
Avril said she was volunteering at a clinic set up in the sports center near her dormitory on campus. “I can’t do much, but I’m immune, and I can follow orders.”
I can hold someone as they die and whisper kind words. She had already proven that she knew how to do it well.
“I don’t know what else I can do,” Avril said. “There’s still fighting, but I’ll leave that to the people who know how. Um, are you safe there?”
Irene tried to be reassuring. “Right now I think everyone’s too scared to do anything.” Right now, I’m sleeping in a shed behind a pile of old paint cans.
Avril had to go to training. Irene ordered the truck to drive alongside the river, stopping from time to time to call his name. She phoned the sheriff’s office, which didn’t seem to take her question seriously but promised to let her know if there was a sighting. She ate one of the apples she’d brought to use to tempt him. The shadows pointed due north for noon, and then began to shift with the afternoon light.
How could an animal the size of a mountain slip through the countryside as if invisible?
But she knew. Everyone had self-quarantined, staying indoors, glued to whatever passed for news or entertainment. And then?
She’d stay one more day, hoping for news.
Hope. Thin gruel.
Avril gently took the phone from the young man’s hand.
“He’s fallen asleep,” she murmured to his parents.
“Do you think…” His mother didn’t know how to ask the question. Avril had learned how to answer it. His vital signs had been steady since morning. She was his pal, and she probably wouldn’t be his last pal, but she wasn’t a doctor, either.
“He’s stable. We’re making sure he’s comfortable. You should have seen him smile when I said I could call you for him.” She took a few steps away so she could talk louder. “How are you?… Your daughter?… Here are some things you can do for her that we’ve found can help. They’re surprisingly simple.…”
Oxygen therapy helped most of all, and the gas had become America’s scarcest resource, the doctors joked. Medical staff joked a lot when patients and family weren’t around. The rest of the time, they rained kindness like a deluge. She was learning a lot. In just two days, the Prez’s cold, as they were now calling it, had been evolving into something bad but nowhere near as bad as it was at first because illnesses evolved. That was one more thing she’d learned.
She looked around the room with its wide-spaced beds for other patients who seemed lucid and in need of a pal. Or who had died. She was learning how to spot that.
Maybe she should think about premed. This wasn’t the end of the world, the doctors assured everyone, just another epidemic, sort of a medical earthquake at magnitude eight: disruption, death, and destruction with additional fatalities due to panic—another doctor joke.
The emergency clinic had been set up in a sports center, with patients scattered throughout its rooms and hallways. The city’s hospitals had no room and not enough medical staff for off-site locations, so even though she had no real experience, immunity had earned her a spot as sort of an orderly, cleaning, chatting, and lugging water or food or bedding as needed. The name “Peng” had worked magic in earning a job, especially when she said she could call him. She was superpowered—but they asked her to wear a face mask and gloves and protective clothing to reassure other people rather than to keep herself safe.
The first thing she did when her shift started was to look in on Shinta in another part of the building. She was dozing, breathing rough and coughing, but not coughing up blood. No rash on her cheeks. An oxygen mask on her face. Her condition was “critical but stable.”
In the part Avril patrolled, a young woman started vomiting into a towel and seemed disturbed. Avril got a clean towel and helped her wash her face. The woman whimpered and looked around, wide-eyed, then looked at Avril with shock.
“Rachel? How did you get here?”
Mental confusion. Not good.
“I’m here to help you.” That was the reply suggested at training. Don’t argue.
A man
