Night of the Purple Moon (8 page)

“Duck, Duck, Goose!” Danny said.

Toucan clapped excitedly. “Toucan play!”

“Here are the rules,” she said. “When I say moo, cover your eyes. And keep them covered! When I say boo, take your hands away. Moo, boo.” Abby demonstrated. “Moo, cover them. Boo, take your hands away.” After they’d practiced for a while Abby was sure they understood what to do.

Jordan fired up the engine and, to the delight of the wild ones, blasted the siren. Abby brought the microphone to her lips. “Hello.” Her voice boomed from the speaker mounted on the roof.

Ready as they would ever be, Jordan backed into the street and headed in the direction of the harbor.

“Moo,” Abby said. The kids giggled and covered their eyes. “Good! No peeking.” They approached the green car wrapped around the telephone pole. Abby felt the pressure of tears and she pinched herself to stay composed. Her brother’s description of the accident had been vague. It was much worse than what she expected. Abby wondered what Ryan Foster had been thinking. Had he found his parents and then panicked?

They drove beyond the gruesome scene. Game over, Abby said, “Boo,” in a tone that echoed her sadness.

Jordan parked at the police station. “We need another radio,” he said and hopped out of the cruiser. He jogged inside the station, but quickly returned empty-handed. “Couldn’t find one.”

They drove to the harbor. Abby repeatedly called out over the loudspeaker. “We can help you. My name is Abby Leigh. I’m in the seventh grade. Please come to the car.”

The electricity was spotty. The jetty beacon flashed, but the neon sign at Haffner’s Gas was off. Street lights were on, traffic lights off.

Jordan steered around a minivan stopped in the middle of the road. The driver was slumped over the wheel. Danny pointed at a body lying prone on the dock, wearing bright yellow rain gear, hard to miss. “Look,” he cried. “That man is asleep.”

“Moo,” Kevin said.

Toucan and Danny ignored Kevin and gawked.

Emily pointed. “A bird!”

Abby thought that Emily was trying to divert the kids’ attention, but it really was a bird. The crow perched on a phone line. The first bird she had seen in three days.

“I’ll give a dollar to anyone who sees a seagull,” Kevin said.

Emily explained that on family trips their parents played a game with them, offering rewards for spotting animals. “A moose was twenty-five dollars,” she said. “We never saw one.”

“If anyone sees a bee, I’ll give them a quarter,” Jordan said.

“It’s too early in the year for bees,” Abby said.

“The average beehive has sixty thousand bees,” Kevin said.

“What if I see a beehive?” Emily asked.

Jordan winked at her in the mirror. “I’ll owe you a hundred dollars.” Abby saw her brother’s cheeks redden.

Here they were—driving a police car on what had recently been the island’s busiest street, talking about moose, beehives, Kevin proving he was a human encyclopedia, her brother flirting with Emily—Abby could only shake her head.

They turned onto Wildwood Drive. The winding road hugged the shoreline on the eastern side of the island. A quarter mile from the harbor, the passengers jolted forward when Jordan slammed the brakes hard, without apology.

“Deer,” Toucan squealed.

Abby turned to Kevin and smiled. “How much for a deer?” When she saw the expressions of shock, she looked out the window and quickly realized she had spoken too soon. In the field on the right, a pack of coyotes was chasing a small fawn.

The fawn zigged and zagged with the inevitable about to happen. Once the pack closed in, Abby could no longer watch.

They drove on in silence, passing mansions—summer homes for rich people—perched back on expansive lawns. Waves pounded the rocky shore on the opposite side of the road, sending up cascades of spray that dissolved into purple mist.

Up ahead, Abby spotted two boys standing on the side of the road. She recognized them from school. “They’re twins,” she said. “I think they’re in the first grade.”

Jordan eased to a smooth stop, and she climbed out.

The boys stared vacantly at her. She squatted to be eye level with them. “My name is Abby. You’ve seen me before?”

The one on the left nodded.

“What are your names?” she asked.

“Chase.”

“Terry.”

“Well, Chase and Terry, have you guys ever ridden in a police car?”

The addition of the twins crowded the car, so Jordan returned home to drop off everyone but Emily. The kids piled out of the police cruiser as if it were a school bus. He breathed a sigh of relief when Abby disappeared inside. She knew him better than anyone, and he was rarely successful trying to hide things from her. But now she suspected nothing.

With Emily beside him in the passenger seat, Jordan pulled away from his house, ready to resume the search.

Once they rounded the bend, he stopped in front of the house owned by the old man who mended fishing nets. “Promise you won’t tell anyone what I’m going to do!” Jordan said.

Emily narrowed her eyes. “How can I promise that? I don’t know what it is.”

“Do you trust me?”

She nodded and lightly touched his arm. His heart fluttered. “Okay,” she said, “I promise.”

Jordan reached behind his back and grabbed the gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. His fingers barely encircled the fat grip. He held it up. Heavy as a brick, the weight surprised him. He had no idea if it were loaded with bullets. The black metal gleamed and still held the warmth of his skin.

Emily gasped and leaned against the door. “Where did you get that?”

“The police station. It was in a drawer. You can’t tell Abby! We might need it in an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?” she asked, her voice quaking.

“Coyotes,” he said.

Another danger might crop up — people wanting to take their food or hurt them. Jordan had considered what it might be like with millions of desperate, hungry survivors. The gun would offer protection. This thought he kept to himself.

“Jordan what do you know about a gun?”

Nothing beyond what he had seen on television and in movies. His parents had forbidden him to play with toy guns. He shrugged. “Just because we have a gun doesn’t mean we’ll use it. It’s only a precaution.”

She lowered her eyes. “I don’t like it.”

“Only you and I will know where it is.”

Jordan stepped out of the car and placed the gun inside a mailbox on a post beside the old man’s driveway. He’d find a better hiding place later.

Neither one of them mentioned it again.

Emily’s voice rang out through the loudspeaker as they drove through the harbor area. “My name is Emily Patel. Please come out. We can help you.”

She turned to him when they were on Wildwood. “Jordan, have you thought what the future will be like? Next year? Five years from now?”

He shook his head, not wanting to frighten her with his version of a desperate future.

“Except for a few adults,” she continued, “we’ll be the oldest people on the planet. We’ll teach the younger kids what we know and open schools. We’ll read books on medicine and train ourselves how to be doctors. Machinery is so complicated. Maybe we’ll live like they did three hundred years ago.”

“I guess you’ve thought about it a lot.”

“Jordan, it will be the responsibility of our generation to keep the human race going.”

“Emily, look!”

Two cows were grazing in the Parlee Farm field.

“Have you ever milked a cow?” he asked, grateful for the distraction.

“You got to be kidding me?”

“How hard can it be? You just grab the udder and squeeze.”

“I wouldn’t mind trying,” Emily said.

Jordan stopped where they had a better view of the cows. They were black and white and huge. Space dust had tinged their white spots purple. “They have plenty of food with all that grass, but we’ll have to make sure they get fresh water,” he said and then raised Abby on the two-way radio to tell her about the discovery. She reminded him that Parlee Farm sold eggs, which meant they would also find chickens, assuming they had survived. After their discussion, Danny and Toucan took turns speaking with him. Toucan, especially, seemed excited to talk over a radio.

Jordan returned the mic and smiled sadly. “I guess when you’re two years old all of this is a big adventure.”

“The first clinical trials have determined the bacterial pathogen is resistant to penicillins, cephalosporins, macrolides…”

The robotic voice was delivering a new update. The internet no longer worked, something about the ISP’s main server going down, Kevin had explained, which left FM 98.5, the CDC station, as the only source of news from the scientists.

“Danny, please get Kevin,” Abby said. She had last seen him upstairs, showing the twins, Chase and Terry, around.

Danny raced up the stairs with Toucan in hot pursuit.

Abby turned up the volume. “Trials remain inconclusive for tetracyclines and aminoglycosides,” the robot continued. “Genetically engineered modifications are being prepared…”

She relaxed when the broadcast repeated. In fact, it played over and over again. But she could have listened to it a hundred times and still not understood much. It was ironic, Abby thought. The listening audience was under the age of fifteen, but you needed a college degree to understand the report. The scientists could use a lesson in how to explain things to kids. Luckily, they had Kevin Patel.

Kevin joined her and, after hearing what the robot had to say, gave her a big grin. “The germs are bacteria. That’s good news.”

Had they listened to the same report? “Kevin, the germs are resistant to all sorts of antibiotics,” Abby said.

“Don’t worry, they’ll find one that works,” he said confidently. “If the antibiotic is used to treat common infections, we might even be able to get it at Murray’s Drug, or at a pharmacy in Portland. This epidemic will be over as fast as it began.”

“These germs are anything but common,” she said. “They came from outer space. What if there’s no antibiotic that kills them?”

“They’ll make an antibiotic, “he said. “Genetic engineering. Abby, I told you, some of the smartest scientists in the world work at the CDC. They have the best equipment.”

She badly wanted to believe him.

“If they have to make an antibiotic,” she asked, “how long will it take?”

“Let’s see. First they’ll have to confirm that it kills the germs in a test tube. Next they’ll test it on mice. If that works, they’ll conduct human trials.” Kevin shrugged. “Three or four months?”

Abby was hoping he’d say two months, or five weeks, or even sooner. “Anyone who enters puberty before then will die!”

Kevin paused, thinking. “It’s possible some of us will develop natural immunity, but you’re probably right. We also don’t know how long the illness will last. Will someone die the minute their hormones reach a certain level? Or will the germs attack them slowly, over a period of weeks or months?”

Just then a runaway train of kids rumbled down the stairs, circled the room once, and roared back upstairs—Toucan the engine, Danny the caboose, Chase and Terry in between—all of them hollering and laughing.

Abby hardly noticed.

“We’re lucky the germs aren’t a virus,” Kevin added. “To stop a virus, you need a vaccine. Making a vaccine takes a year or longer.”

Puberty was a ticking time bomb planted in each and every teen. The older you were the louder and faster it ticked. Abby could not begin to imagine the minute-by-minute anxiety of waiting up to a year for the bomb to go off.

She no longer thought three or four months seemed so bad.

Jordan’s friend, Eddie Egan, lived inland, a mile from the water. Many of Jordan and Emily’s classmates also lived in this neighborhood. Their fathers were commercial fishermen, and Jordan guessed that when they were at home they didn’t want to see the ocean.

As they drove into the neighborhood, there were no signs of life, any life—human, animal, bird.

Jordan’s throat pounded. He had assumed that Eddie, twelve years old, would be alive. Puberty for both of them was a year or two away. Abby had thought the same thing. She worried more how the locals would receive the Leighs and Patels. They were newcomers to the island. Despite that Jordan’s grandparents lived on Castine Island for years and his father grew up here, he and Abby were outsiders.

Jordan turned into the Egan driveway and headed toward the house. A lobster boat sat on blocks in the front yard. Mr. Egan owned several fishing boats. A week ago, Eddie had invited Jordan to go deep sea fishing with his older brother and dad over spring break—today, in fact.

When he pulled to a stop, he and Emily reached for each other at the same moment. Eddie’s house, similar to every other one, stood as still as a tombstone. There were no lights on inside.

Jordan nervously brought the mic to his lips, about to call out. But before his voice boomed over the loudspeaker, the front door flung open, and Eddie, followed by a line of kids, ran outside. Jordan wasted no time hopping out of the cruiser.

The locals froze, staring wide-eyed at him and Emily, and for a moment nobody spoke.

“Leigh,” Eddie finally cried, “what the hell are you doing driving a cop car?”

Ten kids—two holding babies—quickly surrounded Emily and Jordan outside. Emily knew those in her sixth grade class and recognized others from school lunch period. She thought the babies must be siblings of the kids holding them.

They peppered Jordan with questions.

Without access to the internet and unaware of the emergency broadcast station, Eddie and the others who had found their way to his house did not know about the space germs or the efforts of the CDC, though they had suspected the purple dust had a lot to do with the mysterious tragedies they had all experienced.

Jordan told them all that he knew.

“I don’t believe adults are dead everywhere.” The boy who said this had broad shoulders, clearly the strongest among them, and the oldest. “My father took the ferry to Portland,” he added. “He’d call, but the phones aren’t working.”