I looked around the room helplessly, desperately wishing they were both here. My eyes fixed on a small red light blinking on the phone in the kitchen, and I raced to it, vaulting over the back of the couch. I punched the button for message play back.
“You have one new voicemail message... left today at... three... sixteen... PM...” The digital voice was agonizingly slow. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding as my mother’s warm, sweet voice filled the kitchen like the aroma of baking bread. “Hello, my darlings, we just wrapped, and I’m headed back to the hotel. I’m awfully tired, and I’ve got a headache, so I’m just going to hit the hay when I get there. I hope you both had amazingly wonderful days and aren’t sitting around moping because you miss me so much.” I could hear her smiling as she said this. “We’ll catch up tomorrow night. Autumn, honey, I hope you did well on your history test. And Mister, I’ll text you a picture of the costume they have me in today. I think you’ll like it.” I smiled at her nickname for my dad. She sighed and then said, “Have sweet dreams about me tonight. I’ll be having sweet ones about you both. Kisses.”
I tapped a button to save the message. The kitchen suddenly seemed cold and empty without her voice filling it.
I backed up until my legs bumped against the coffee table. The table was a giant wooden square my mother painted a floral design on in one of her fits of creativity. I sat down and scooted to the center. I placed the TV remote and my cell phone next to me and swallowed a few times, wondering if I was going to be sick. Was I sick? The kind of sick the news was talking about? I felt my forehead. I couldn’t tell if I was any warmer than usual. I pressed my first two fingers against the inside of my wrist. My pulse was hammering through my veins.
I suddenly remembered when I was nine years old and afraid I would die in my sleep. I imagined all sorts of ways my body could stop working. All the intricate and delicate parts of the human body fascinated and horrified me. I made myself sick for several months by not allowing myself to sleep. I got stomachaches and headaches, which only fueled my belief that something was wrong with me.
When my dad figured out what was going on, he bought me a stethoscope. “Just like a real doctor has,” he told me as he gently placed the metal piece against my chest so I could hear my heartbeat. “The heart is the most important organ in your entire body. It keeps all the other organs going. This way, you’ll be able to hear exactly what it’s doing all night long.” The steady rhythm of my own heart helped me to sleep again.
I knew my heart wasn’t going to be a good indicator of whether I was getting sick or not now. The news stations reported a high fever was the first indicator of the Crimson Fever. Getting up, I rummaged through the medicine cabinet until I found a thermometer. I stuck it under my tongue and returned to my perch on the coffee table.
I flipped between news stations and kept the thermometer under my tongue until it was dark outside. Every few minutes, I rotated calling my parents, texting Sarah and checking the digital display on the thermometer. My temperature maintained a perfect ninety-eight point six.
I unfolded my legs and winced as I stood up. My feet were numb. I hobbled to the windows, parted the gauzy curtains and stared down thirty-seven stories to the street choked with cars. I could see their outlines, the beams of their headlights and the flashlights pedestrians carried. Everything was bathed in the cool, electric blue-lavender of the Los Angeles nighttime sky.
Obviously people weren’t staying at home like the news stations advised. Based on the boxes and suitcases they carried, it looked like everyone was trying to get out of town. The number of reported deaths blamed on the Crimson Fever had grown over the last few hours. I suppose I couldn’t really blame people for wanting to run, but from what I’d seen on TV, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to run to. In the span of five hours, the sickness seemed to be everywhere. I’d watched
The Today Show
with my dad before school this morning while I ate my cereal, and there was no mention of it. This morning. School. It all seemed like days ago. Would I even go to school tomorrow?
Suddenly, a beep cracked the silence of the room. I jumped, clutching the neck of my t-shirt in terror. It was my phone. I could see the lit screen – a small rectangle of light in the dark room. I sighed heavily. It wasn’t a message or someone calling. The battery was low.
I retrieved the charger and plugged it into a socket in the kitchen. I mechanically called my dad again, hopeless that I’d actually get through.
“Hello!?” My dad’s deep voice rushed through me, reassuring me.
“Dad! Thank God! I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon!” I realized we were talking over each other and stopped so I could hear what he was saying.
“—haven’t been able to get anyone on the phone for hours! Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m at home. I’m fine. I went to see Sarah on my way to the radio station, and we saw her mom on the news with a fever and her dad told us to come back here, but she went to find her parents anyway and—”
My dad cut me off. “Please stay inside, sweetie. I’m trying to get home now. I had to drive up to Malibu this afternoon to oversee a construction problem. I’ve never seen traffic like this. I’ve been on the road for hours. Did you get any of my messages?”
“No, nothing. I’ve been leaving you messages.”
“The phone lines must be overloaded. I’m sorry, sweetheart. It might be a few hours before I can get home. Just stay inside.” His voice began to sound labored. “Don’t go out on the terrace, and don’t open any windows. Have you taken your temperature?” he asked, breathing deeply now.
I nodded and then realized he couldn’t see me so I said, “Yes, it’s normal.”
“Good girl. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to get through to you on the phone.” He paused, then said, “Wow, that full moon sure is bright tonight, isn’t it, Missus?”
I swallowed, confused. “Missus” was his nickname for my mother. I looked out the kitchen window and saw only a quarter moon. Chills broke out over my back.
“Dad, have you taken your temperature?” I asked.
There was a pause before I heard him cheerfully answer. “I’m fine, don’t worry about me. I’ll be home soon. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” I said automatically, then panicked and cried out, “Dad! Wait!” But he’d already hung up. I’d forgotten to tell him my mother left a message.
“... is being upgraded to an official plague.” I heard a news reporter say from the living room. I turned my attention back to the television. “Unofficial reports from inside Cedars now claim the fatality rate is suspected to be nearly 100 percent.” The reporter’s face was flushed behind a white surgical mask, and I watched him sway and then steady himself against the desktop. “The disease is setting new records with its unparalleled rate of globalization.” He paused to loosen his already-loose tie even more. “The CDC reports that the first case was recorded at eight a.m. in Los Angeles and by mid-afternoon, hundreds of other cases were reported worldwide. This is... this is unprecedented...”
I slid down the cabinets to the floor. What was happening? How could a disease spread so fast? My dad was experiencing dementia. That was one of the symptoms. He was hours from home. Could I go get him somehow? Where would I even start looking? He hadn’t told me what route he’d taken. My mother’s words echoed through my head, “If you’re lost, stay where you are. We’ll find you.” I should stay home. He would find me. I just had to wait.
I sat on the kitchen floor, aware of the hours passing and the shifting light as the sun rose. I waited to hear my dad’s key in the door. But he never came home, and my mother didn’t call back. The texts from Sarah stopped by morning, too.
A rock formed in my stomach, a heavy, dense rock of truth. My parents weren’t coming home. I stared at the creamy Los Angeles morning sky and was too stunned to even react to the morbid knowledge of their fate. I was alone inside what was left of this city. The last fifteen hours had changed my life forever.
I used to be Autumn Winters, daughter of an actress and an architect. I had been one of three living in this home, but now I was just Autumn Winters, and I was alone.
Six weeks later
I sat cross-legged on the wooden plank floor of our rooftop terrace, eating from a can of tuna while scanning the dial of a battery-powered beach radio. Two days after The Plague hit, the first television network turned to static, and within the next forty-eight hours, the rest of the networks disappeared as well.
Radio, on the other hand, gave me hope. It was less complicated to broadcast a radio signal, and I scanned the dial every hour or so, desperately hoping to hear a voice. Surely, I wasn’t the only person left alive, even after such a powerful epidemic. But the silence in the streets below, and on the TV and radio, bothered me like a toothache – I kept poking it to see if it still hurt. I refused to believe the unofficial reports were true. The fatality rate couldn’t have been 100 percent. I was still here. But I hadn’t gotten sick. Did that mean I was immune? There had to be other immune people out there, too. And I was determined to find them.
The first week was the hardest. I barricaded myself in my bedroom and swung from one extreme to the other. Panic attacks, fits of hysterical crying, temper tantrums and sleepless nights blurred the first several days into a gray smudge. The weeks that followed were terrifying, boring, sad and very lonely. Then I noticed my clothes were baggy, and dark circles underlined my puffy eyes, and I decided it was finally time to leave my bedroom. I cleaned myself up, organized and rationed food and supplies for myself, and started a daily routine that I forced myself to keep.
Taking control of what I could kept me from agonizing over things I couldn’t. Like the day the water quit working. It scared me at first, and I wondered if the electricity would be next and I’d be plunged into darkness when the sun set into the ocean every night. But when the lights continued to burn brightly, I remembered learning somewhere that the Hoover Dam powered most of the Southwest. Water from the Colorado River would continue to push through the hydraulic turbines, sending electricity through the wires and eventually to me, even if there was no one left to oversee it.
The most unsettling thing was how the noise of the city rapidly quieted after The Plague, like someone turning down the volume of a stereo. So I was shocked when a scream softly ripped through the silence like distant thunder. At first I thought it came from the radio in my hand. I sat up straight, listening. My scalp prickled. The screaming continued, faint and echoing. It was coming from the street, thirty-seven stories below.
I stabbed my fork into what was left of my tuna and placed the half-empty can on the wooden terrace floor. I stood up and walked to the edge. When my dad designed this building for my mother, he made the outside of the structure look like one smooth sheet of blue glass, like a great blue waterfall, which is why he named it The Water Tower. We lived on the top floor, and he had installed several security features for my mother and me, including a private underground garage and an express elevator. The terrace was on the roof and was the entire length and width of the building itself. The glass sides of the building continued up to form a wall that reached my collarbone. No one would even know this terrace existed without some prior knowledge of the building.
I stepped up onto an orange-cushioned ottoman and leaned over the edge of the three-inch-thick blue glass. The wind whipped my hair across my face. I picked up my binoculars and peered down at the street for the source of the noise.
I found a figure darting through a line of cars. It was a small boy, maybe twelve years old, with olive skin and a terrified expression. He wore a dirty, white shirt, and a bag was slung across his back. He raced between a line of abandoned cars and quickly ducked out of sight. A sudden crack ripped through the air up to my ears. I searched for the boy among the cars. I found his foot peeping out from behind a tire, as if he were lying on his stomach. Who was he hiding from?
Then a figure strolled out of the burned-out hole of the market across the street. It was a tall man with smooth, wavy brown hair and, even from this distance, I could tell he was very attractive. His features were angular, and the late morning sun highlighted his muscular shoulders. He strode between the cars, heading for the boy’s hiding spot. I scanned my binoculars back and forth between him and the boy’s foot with growing concern.
The way the tall brown-haired man moved toward the boy was hypnotically slow, as if he had all the time in the world. Something about him sent chills across the sun-warmed skin on my arms. I wanted to yell down to the boy, warn him, but my throat went dry, and all I could do was watch.
The man reached the boy’s hiding spot and stared down at him for a moment before bending over.
Another man suddenly appeared beside him, and I jumped, startled. He was a heavily muscled man with a shaved head, wearing a black tank top and camouflage cargo pants. I squinted into the binoculars and pressed the eye cups closer around my eyes. He held a very large gun. The kind you see in movies.
I refocused the binoculars to find the boy again. The brown-haired man hooked the boy’s bag over his shoulder and dug through it. The boy’s foot didn’t move.
My stomach churned. I focused again on the man with the gun, then back on the boy’s foot. Then his foot disappeared, suddenly jerked back behind the car. I focused the binoculars above him and saw the man with the gun grasping the small boy under the arms, holding him up. The boy’s head lolled forward onto his chest, limp. Then I remembered the sharp noise I heard a moment after the boy hid. Was it the delayed sound of a gunshot? Could it have taken that long for the noise to travel up thirty-seven stories to my ears? Did I witness his murder?
I jerked my head sideways, not wanting to see any more. I looked out at the ocean, shining almost white in the morning sun and tried to calm myself. I started gasping for air and stepped back, but my foot only found empty air, and only then did I remember I’d been perched on the ottoman.
I grabbed for the ledge to catch myself, but my fingertips grazed the smooth glass. I threw my arms out to the sides to grab on to anything but only found empty air as I fell backwards. I turned my head to one side instinctively to see where I was falling and saw the wooden planks rushing up fast at me, and I knew this would hurt. I squeezed my eyes shut as I hit the floor, my bottom making first contact, sending a spasm of pain shooting up my spine. I landed heavily on my right arm, my elbow cracking against the wooden boards. Unable to stop the momentum, the right side of my head slammed against the boards and stars exploded in front of me, then faded with the rest of the world.
The sun was beating down on me when I opened my eyes. I swallowed, but there was no moisture in my mouth to dampen my throat. I was confused. I lifted my head from the hot deck and cried out, clutching my head with both hands. My head was aching, threatening to split in two if I didn’t hold it together with my hands. I peeped out through slitted eyelids. The first thing I saw was a can of tuna sitting on the deck. A fork was stuck in it, standing up at an angle.
I groaned as my memories came back. I rolled over and pushed myself up to a sitting position to assess the damage. My right elbow had some dried blood around a cut and my tailbone ached, but I could move. I bent my knees and elbows and cursed at my stupidity. If I broke something... well, it’s not like I could just go to the ER.
I stood, clutching the back of a deck chair to steady myself. Tentatively, I slid my fingers through my hair along the right side of my head. I felt nauseous as my fingertips encountered crusty blood. There was a lot of it, but none of it was damp, so it wasn’t bleeding anymore. I staggered down the stairs to the main level.
I gasped when I saw my blue eyes staring out from a lobster red face in the bathroom mirror. I raised my hand curiously and gingerly touched my red cheek. The tight burning feeling told me I’d gotten sunburned while I lay unconscious on the deck. Great. Insult to injury. I angrily yanked open one of the drawers and fumbled with the bottle of aspirin. I swallowed two and then threw the bottle back in the drawer and slammed it. I flung open the cabinet under the sink and rummaged around, knocking over a bottle of Clorox and dumping a container of Q-tips on the floor before finding the rubbing alcohol.
I managed to clean up my elbow enough to put a bandage on it and then worked on trying to clean up my head wound, which proved to be difficult. After threatening my hair that I would shave it off if it didn’t behave, I gave up and stomped into the kitchen, accidentally kicking the box of Q-tips, spraying what was left of them across the floor.
I flung open the refrigerator door and found the bottle of aloe near the back. I slammed the bottle on the granite counter top and shrieked as the top flew off and a spurt of green liquid shot up into the air like Old Faithful. It splattered against the ceiling, some sticking, but most of it dripping back down onto the counter.
I stood there for a moment, chewing on my lip, knowing my behavior was ridiculous. But I didn’t care. It just wasn’t fair. Why had this happened? Why was I still here? Why weren’t my parents and my friends? There were obviously other people left. People left to kill each other.
I took a shuddering breath as the vision of the boy’s head rolling onto his chest came back to me and tried to remember my resolution to not cry again. But tears came anyway. They poured down my burning cheeks, the salt water stinging my irritated skin. I felt so pathetic. So helpless. And scared out of my mind. I clutched the countertop. Why didn’t someone come for me? Didn’t anyone know I was here? That I needed help? I was just a kid. Well, seventeen but not an adult yet. I was defenseless and alone in a world so drastically changed it was as if a meteor had crashed into the earth and made it rotate backwards.
I sighed and rubbed the aloe onto my face, and then dug an ice pack from the back of the freezer. I wrapped it in a dish towel and lightly touched it against the right side of my head. I winced. The aspirin wasn’t kicking in fast enough.
I wiped up the aloe explosion as best I could while holding the ice pack to my head and then flopped down onto the couch. I flipped on the radio and waited for the familiar static to fill the room, but was shocked when I heard a voice instead.
I turned the volume up and listened, but the voice was gone. I turned up the volume louder and adjusted the dial, but there was just a clicking noise. Suddenly it stopped and a male voice said, “We are The Reconstruction Front, an organization created by survivors to help those left in need after the devastating Crimson Fever. Our goal is to rebuild society and reconnect the members of this community. We can provide food, clothing, shelter and supplies for your personal and medical needs. We are located on the Los Angeles Westside. Follow the white flags to the warehouse store on the corner of Lincoln and Washington Boulevard. You are not alone. Stand up and be counted. We can rebuild together.”