A little while later I whisper over the wall Fred and I share. "I have gossip you don't know. Ha ha." "Get your ass over here right now," he commands. "No. I'm busy." "You are no such thing. You barely even work. You just design newsletters and organize artsy crap for the community." I smile. "Well, all you do is act all charming and get people to give us money. And—" "And that's how you get paid. So get your ass over here or I'll purposely pull in less this year so you lose your job." I laugh and head into his cubicle, where he sits with a smug smile. "So, Neville asked Luna out last night." He rubs his hands with glee and I grin back. "When a bunch of us went out last week they talked all night," he says. "I thought I saw a spark. I forgot all about it because we'd given up on them ever getting together." "Well, we've got our work cut out for us there. Neville is so damn shy, but—" "But what?" asks Neville, who leans against the cubicle entry with a soft smile. "But there are certain people I don't think you'd ask out if you weren't interested in them, like girlfriend-interested," I say, and tug on the sleeve of his t-shirt. Neville doesn't exactly dress up for work. "That sentence made almost no sense," he says, in an attempt to deflect the accusation, but his face is scarlet. I bounce up and down like a three-year-old but don't want to scare him off, so I change the subject. "Hey, any more news on Bornavirus?" Fred gives an exaggerated shake of his head. "Y'all and your conspiracy theories. Now what, this is a government plot to overthrow society as we know it and implement a new world order?" Neville rolls his eyes. "I highly doubt it. It may be some sort of disease or weapon gone awry. But, whatever it is, it's everywhere in the world. They're saying to get to a hospital if you're sick, but they won't say if they can actually cure it. And no one can find anyone who was sick and got better. Some cities in China are already under martial law. They're shooting people on sight." "Really?" I ask, feeling a small prickle of unease. "They're always shooting people on sight in China, my friends," Fred says. "Oppressive government, remember?" Fred is always level headed, he is the foil to our belief that someone, somewhere, is up to something that they're covering up. Neville and I would have packed up for the apocalypse ten times by now, had Fred not brought us back down to reality. "True," Neville admits. "But here's footage of a city in Germany, taken hours ago." He hands us his iPad. Soldiers hold back bystanders while they fire on a group of advancing figures. They drop to the ground as the onlookers scream, but it's shadowy and hard to see, so Fred is unimpressed. "Let's see what they're saying on the news," Fred suggests with a sigh. He steers us to the conference room. "The only way I'm going to get any work done today is if I can stop you two before Hermione has us living in her bunker until this blows over." "Hey," I say, "don't make fun of my bunker!" "You have a bunker?" Neville asks. " I've been to your house a million times, how did I not know you have a bunker?" "It's just my parents' log cabin upstate. It's still full of food and stuff. Like a year's worth." Neville whistles. He knows that my parents were weekend homesteaders and had lots of food, but I guess I never mentioned all the stuff is still there. I miss the log cabin after my dream last night. It's secluded; my parents always half-kidded that it would be the perfect place to ride out the apocalypse. It was a place where I would read for hours in the hammock under the trees, make a salad from the garden five minutes before dinner and spend all summer playing with my younger brother Harry, and our closest neighbors. It's also the place where Ron and I sat and waited for my parents to arrive, one Friday night in April three years ago. They never came. They never knew Ron had proposed the night before. They would have been ecstatic. They loved Ron almost as much as I did.
Ron and I had sat in the warmth of the wood stove. He leaned back on the couch and leafed through one of my dad's solar power catalogs. My feet were still freezing from falling into a creek on our hike and I plopped them in his lap. "Hey, handsome," I said, and wiggled them for a foot massage. A dimple showed on his freckled cheek. I loved the way it made him look like a little boy, even with the red stubble that was back by evening. "I don't know," Ron said, picking up our previous thread about the wedding. "I kind of like the whole obeying part of the vows." I rolled my eyes, not even rising to the bait. "I already obey you." He smiled and held up my foot to prove his point. "It's about time you started doing the same. Or at least take it into consideration when I tell you not to leap from one rock to the next because it's slippery. I'm just trying to keep you dry." He was referring to earlier when I had eschewed his outstretched hand while crossing the creek. I could jump to the next rock just fine, I said, right before I slid off it. "Do you know Laura Ingalls told Almanzo Wilder she wouldn't have the word obey in their vows? She said she wouldn't be able to obey anyone against her better judgment." When I first read that as a little girl I'd been so impressed. "Your hero. But you misjudged those rocks. And your, um, athletic ability." His mouth curved up. He was one of the only people in the world who found my clumsiness endearing. "I am the very picture of grace." I wiggled my feet. "Back to work!" He picked up my foot and kissed it before giving a little bow and obeying. When headlights finally shone through the front window I jumped up. My parents might have been cell phone-hating hippies at heart, but they always called. I was uneasy enough to have a mini-lecture prepared. I stepped out on the porch and was surprised to see Sam, the sheriff. His hands shook as he took off his hat. The beam from the motion-activated light left his face in shadow. It's never good news when the sheriff comes to your house and removes his hat. I hadn't had personal experience with it before then, but I was pretty sure of that. I backed into the doorjamb as if I could escape what he was going to say. "Hermione? Hermione, your mom and dad were in an accident on the other side of town." Sam walked toward me, his hands out in a supplicating gesture. His face was haggard when he stepped into the rectangle of light the open door threw on the ground. Like gravity was working overtime on his jowls and the corners of his eyes. I gripped the door. Ron put a hand on my shoulder. "Are they okay, Sam?" he asked. "Where are they?" Sam shook his head and blinked. "I'm so sorry. Hermione, I'm so sorry." He gripped the hat in his hands so tightly that his knuckles were white. "They both died at the scene. It looks like they slid on a patch of mud. They hit a tree." "Okay," I said and walked back in the house on shaky legs. I sat down on the couch. Ron sat next to me and took my hand. He was crying, I noticed, as he tried to hug me. I sat there, wooden, wondering what I was supposed to do or say next. It was like I had forgotten how to be human. I couldn't remember what people did in these situations. "Okay," I repeated helplessly. "Sam, what should I do?" I wondered if Sam thought I was cold because I wasn't crying. He and my parents were friends. They would talk about gardens and hunting while relaxing with a home-brewed beer on the porch. There was nothing but pity in his eyes, though, when I looked up. He'd been the bearer of this kind of news before, and it occurred to me that if I was the only recipient who was numb and dry-eyed then maybe he wouldn't look so sympathetic. Then I wondered why I was thinking these ridiculous thoughts instead of feeling anything. "You'll need to come down to the hospital, Hermione. I'm sorry. You can take your time." I got up immediately because I couldn't think of anything else to do, and walked out the door with Ron's arm around me. Three years have passed since then. I've only gone back to that cabin once, to scatter my parents' ashes on the land they loved and planned to live out their lives. I haven't seen it since. *
The news blares in the conference room, bringing me back from my thoughts. "…not to panic. They say that there is much false information on the internet and to visit the CDC's website for information concerning Bornavirus LX. There are a suspected few thousand cases in New York City right now, the CDC states. "If you have a high fever or joint pain or have come in contact with someone you think may be infected, please go to the nearest hospital for treatment. Doctors say that antiviral medication must be administered immediately for optimal effectiveness." I raise an eyebrow at Neville. "First I'm hearing of it," he says. "Stay tuned to New York One for updates on Bornavirus LX. There will be a live statement by the Board of Health in one hour." Fred turns to us. "See? A few thousand cases, and they already have a treatment plan in place, not so bad. We'll just steer clear of crazy people and get some drinks." "Maybe we shouldn't go out." I feel a pang of foreboding. "Even if it's nowhere near as bad as those sites are saying, I'm sure it's worse than 'authorities' are saying. Maybe we should hang out at my house." "No!" Fred grimaces. "We are not ruining Friday evening!" I punch him in the arm. "Thanks. I didn't realize my house was second only to hell." "You know what I mean. How about we go to Paddy's, and we can always walk the four blocks to your house if we think we should. Which we won't." "That's fine with me," Neville says. "I don't imagine it will be so bad that we can't go out. And the only thing that would keep Fred from going out on a Friday night would be a nuclear bomb detonation." Fred nods emphatically, swinging his red locks. Even though they are polar opposites as people, sometimes he reminds me of his younger brother. It stings a little. "Fine, you win," I say, not able to tell him no. "Maybe I'm being an over-cautious dork." There's just too much of a disparity between what we're hearing unofficially and officially. The difference between fifty thousand and a few thousand is huge. Someone is wrong, or they're lying.