I gave him a lazy smile. “Hey.”
“What happened today?” Low and steady, his tone alerted me nothing was getting by him.
“There was a situation.”
He sat down across the island and raked his fingers through his hair. “Tell me.”
The story unraveled. In his dominating way, he stripped every detail from me. Except my A’s. I didn’t discuss my delusions. Never.
His composure disintegrated as my report went on. His face flushed. Trenches rutted his hair from his fingers pushing through it. But he let me unfold the events without interrupting. The greenhouse. The aphid. The pitchfork. When I told him I was pulled into the pool, he gripped the edge of the counter with white knuckles.
Then I recounted the part about the spiny arm shackled to my leg. He sprang from the stool and kicked it across the room. It bounced off the wall.
“What the fuck?” He paced, keeping his distance from me. Red splotched his face and neck.
He paused before me, his control on a brittle leash. “You went outside. Oh wait…No. Not only did you go outside, you were armed with a pair of scissors? Are you fucking stupid?”
Probably, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut while his temper roared.
“Okay. Fine. We’re going to make this real clear.” He pointed a shaky finger at me. “Absolutely no going outside alone.” He dropped his hand to the counter and blinked at me. “Nod your head.”
Feeling like a sixteen-year-old with a bad report card, I nodded.
“And if… I repeat…if you have to leave this house alone…” He paused. “We’re talking about the house on fire here.” He played with his goatee, probably considering other scenarios. “If you have to egress alone, under no circumstances do you do so without your shotgun, carbine, side arm and vest.”
I nodded again.
He paced a few laps around the island, pausing at the floor-length windows each time to survey the backyard. When it came to me, he was all bark. I wasn’t frightened. Just too exhausted for a boiling confrontation. So, I kept quiet. Watched him pace. Waited for the cool down.
He righted the stool and settled on top of it. “Let me see your hand.”
I put my hand in his, palm up. Crimson gashes tattooed my skin, wrist to fingertips. I watched his eyes, asked the question that had been plaguing me. “Am I infected now?”
His head snapped up, face soft. “No, B-ay. Since you seem to be immune to the airborne virus, we only have to worry about getting bit now. That…mouth thing has to release a compound. That’s how men absorb the infection.” He squeezed my arm. “I may not know a lot about what’s going on, but on this I’m positive.”
“How do you know? I could be carrying it now and not know. What are the symptoms?”
His flinch mirrored my inward cringe. I wanted to withdraw the question. Instead, we sat in silence, reliving our worst memories. The fever. The thinning skin, turning gray then green. Bloody vomit soaking butterfly-printed sheets. Contorted faces. Pupils receding until they weren’t there at all. Tiny hands hardening, elongating. “You’re right. I’m not infected.” I forced my eyes to his. “There’s not much left of the aphid. I checked from the deck a few times before the sun went down.”
He prodded my hand. “Maybe there’s something to that water theory, huh?” He laid my hand on the counter and fetched the medical kit.
“There’s something else,” I said. “This will sound naive, but I wasn’t afraid of it. I tapped into…I don’t know what to call it, instincts maybe, that I didn’t know I had. I mean, I was worried at first. Then I remembered my self-defense training and figured out how to beat it.”
“It’s called adrenaline. Grandmas use that shit to lift cars and save little kids.” He returned with antiseptic and bandages. “Doesn’t matter. Next time, you’ll be armed. No more close encounters.”
“Yeah…okay.” Except that close encounter made me feel alive for the first time in two months.
Although Joel’s uneventful day paled in comparison, his productivity lifted our morale. He collected most of the items on our supply list, acquiring the majority from empty homes. All the gas stations were dry, but he siphoned more gas than we needed from abandoned cars.
“Most of the neighboring cities dropped off the power grid,” he said. “Grain Valley will follow soon.” Water had shut off two days earlier.
He stood and rummaged through one of the pouches. “I only ran into two men today. And I saw at least half a dozen aphids. I wasn’t able to pry anything substantial from the men. They were pretty skittish. Neither had been out of their homes in a while.”
Two weeks had passed since I crawled out of my depression. The last broadcast television station went off the air a week earlier. We longed for communication, news, any information that could give us hope.