PODs (22 page)

It was a long week. I busied myself with work, going to the various stores in town to stock up on supplies and studying my teaching textbooks at night.

The closer Saturday came, the more on edge I became. By Wednesday, the students were getting on my nerves and I snapped at them. Friday morning, I thought about calling in sick, but I didn’t know the rules about missing work. Besides, I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts all day.

Saturday finally came. George hadn’t told me what time he’d be over.

Hurry up, George
.

I paced the rooms waiting for him. From one room to another, the bedroom to the kitchen and back again, I’d pick up the knickknacks and trinkets and rearrange them only to put them back in their original spots the next time my pacing led me to the room.

The doorbell pealed through my small house, and I jumped. I’d been looking out the front bay window, but I hadn’t seen him walk up. Then I realized the doorbell had only chimed once. The bell for the front door chimed twice.

I peeked out the peephole to make sure he wasn’t waiting on my front porch. When I didn’t see him, I jogged to the back of the house and opened the back door.

“Hey, Eva.” He gave me a hug and quick kiss as he stepped in.

“It’s so good to see you. Do you want some lemonade?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“So what’s up?” I demanded, handing him his drink.

“You never were one for small talk.” He smiled.

I didn’t smile back.

He grabbed a kitchen chair and swung it around, straddling it. He put his drink on the table, and I watched a bead of condensation run down the side of the glass. George’s finger played in the liquid pooling on the table before he took a drink. The ice cubes clinked against the glass and I flinched—the sound was too loud in the room. I waited. George set the glass down and looked at me.

“I saw Seth,” he said quietly.

“Really! Where?”

“He’s living here now.”

My heart sped up. It was hard to breathe and I had to strain to find enough air to ask my next question.

“Why?”

“The government had dispersed the POD residents evenly over the continental U.S. Hawaii and Alaska are too far away to repopulate.”

“Yeah, so?” I asked, slipping into a chair across from George.

“Well, the villages were too small.”

“I wondered about that. Less than fifteen hundred people makes for a really small town. It’s hard to be self-sufficient.”

“That’s why they’re combining villages. Instead of one for each state, they’re combining them and keeping the majority of them on the Eastern seaboard, where it’s easier to move goods to and from the villages.”

“Like the first colonies.”

“Yeah.”

“Seth and David were in the same camp,” I whispered, my heart speeding up. I rubbed my sweaty palms on my jeans. I started to ask a question, but my voice came out gravelly. Clearing my throat, I started again. “David’s here?”

“No.”

My heart dropped. “But you just said—”

“Seth said David left not long after they arrived at their village. He’s been gone a month, looking for you.”

It took me a few seconds to process the information. I stared at the wood grain of the table top, following the lines with my finger. My mind spun and blood pulsed behind my ears. David was gone. He was looking for me. My hands gripped the table so hard it hurt. The edge bit into my flesh, and my fingernails bent under the force. I stood up so fast my chair toppled backward, landing on the wood floor with a crack.

“You’re telling me David is wandering around God knows where looking for me. Meanwhile, the government realizes they screwed up and made the villages too small. Our villages are combined, but because David left he doesn’t know. Did I get it all?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that just flippin’ ironic?” I wanted to cry. “If David had waited a few weeks, the government would have driven him right to me.”

George didn’t say anything. He sat at my kitchen table, just turning his glass of lemonade around and around on the tabletop.

“Where’s Seth? I want to talk with him.”

“You can’t,” George told me. “He’s in quarantine. His entire village is.”

“What… why?”

“Military regs. Anyone who leaves their assigned village has a mandatory quarantine period when they arrive at a new facility. That’s how I found Seth. I was working the quarantine ward.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What are they in quarantine for?”

George looked up at me. “The government isn’t sure the virus is dead.”

My chest tightened. “What do you mean? How can it still be active? There were no hosts…we were all underground.” I shook my head. “No. They told us it had to be transmitted from person to person. Without a host, the virus dies.”

“Yeah, in theory. But there’s something else…”

I groaned and picked up my chair. What else could there possibly be? I dropped onto the chair and put my head in my hands, my fingers threading into my hair. I squeezed my eyes shut to hold in the tears that were threatening to fall. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and tell George I didn’t want to hear anymore. Instead, I looked up at him. “What else?” My voice sounded deceptively normal.

“There are…survivors. Some people made it. They boarded themselves up inside their homes. Some went to isolated areas where they wouldn’t be exposed to anyone else. Some were just lucky, I guess.”

“Survivors? Where? How many?”
My parents, maybe?
I rubbed a hand across my face.
My dad promised he and my mom would go to the cabin on Perch Lake and wait out the virus. Maybe
…

“I don’t know, Eva. I don’t think the government even knows how many. I just know that anyone who comes into the village is required to stay in isolation for two weeks. Sometimes more, depending on what type of exposure they had.”

“So we’ll talk to Seth when he gets out of quarantine,” I said.

“Well, that may be an issue. The different districts aren’t supposed to have a lot of contact with each other. In fact, the only contact that’s permissible is what’s necessary for job completion. I can see you at school because I’m taking classes there. But I shouldn’t be visiting you now. It isn’t work-related.”

“That’s why you came to the back door.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” I asked, confused.

“I don’t know.” He lifted his glass and took a long pull.

“Man, you’re just full of good news today, aren’t you, George?”

T
he remaining week of Seth’s quarantine period crawled by.

He’d told us while we were in the POD that he excelled in math. Maybe he’ll be assigned to teach and I’ll be able to talk to him without fear of getting caught mingling with another district
.

I didn’t know the letter on his badge. I asked George, but when he went to the clinic to ask Seth, he was escorted out because it wasn’t his month for clinic duty.

We sat at a cheap table that had been made to look like wood, surrounded by mismatched chairs. Our lunch—if you could call it that—congealed on our trays. We didn’t have much time to talk before we had to be back in class.

“Why are they going to so much trouble to keep people separated? Districts aren’t supposed to mingle unless it’s work-related; you can’t enter the clinic because it’s your month of classes. I don’t understand. This isn’t how a normal town would work.”

George shook his head. “We aren’t in a normal town, Eva. Nothing about this is normal.”

“And what’s with the curfew all of a sudden? We’ve lived here almost six weeks and
now
they institute a curfew?” I asked, too loudly. People at neighboring tables turned and looked at me.

“The nursing and med students have a theory, but it’s just a theory. We think it has something to do with the survivors. None of the villages have allowed the survivors inside. The curfew helps keep the villagers inside so the police can monitor movement for non-residents.”

“But wouldn’t they just put them in quarantine, like they did Seth?”

“No, they aren’t allowing them in because they don’t have enough quarantine equipment to deal with all of them. I don’t even think we have the proper equipment to fully protect us if one of the other villagers had the virus. I think the quarantine is just for show…to make the villagers feel safer than we actually are. If we feel like our little area is clean and virus-free, no one will want to chance contaminating it by allowing non-residents inside,” George said.

The bell rang. I eased out of my chair and picked up my lunch tray. “Back to class.”

“Yup. Lunch tomorrow?”

I smiled. “Sure thing.”

George nodded once and walked out of the cafeteria. I stood watching him leave, tapping my fingernails against the scarred tabletop. Something he’d said nagged at me. I couldn’t put the pieces together, but I was sure when I did I wasn’t going to like what I saw.

That evening Nona and I took a walk. I said we needed some fresh air after being cooped up all day at work. Truthfully, I wanted to do some exploring. We walked down the sidewalk to the main street that ran through town, and then turned left. I knew approximately where the clinic was, but wasn’t completely sure. I was on a mission to find it.

We walked by the park in the center of town, made especially pretty by the leaves turning colors. Bullfrogs croaked in the small pond in the park. The far-off sound of loons carried across the evening breeze.

We came to the white church I remembered from my first day in the village. I had thought it looked so beautiful, sitting tall and proud in the middle of town. Up close, it looked a far throw from beautiful. The white paint flaked from the wooden clapboards, and the cement stairs leading to the front door were crumbled and broken. The once-beautiful stained glass windows showed several cracks. It wasn’t the majestic temple I remembered.

Nona and I chatted about work, talked about the unruly students, gossiped about the other teachers. We passed the grocery store, the teenager who ran it already closing up for the night. I yelled a greeting, and he smiled and waved. We continued walking through the town square. I admired the bright yellow and orange mums lining the walkways. The smell of fresh paint filled the air as we passed the library, the small building getting a much-needed facelift before opening.

“It’s gonna be dark soon. We should turn back,” Nona said.

“Okay, let’s walk to the edge of the square and turn around there.”

“Wait,” she said slowly. “Are you going somewhere in particular?”

I didn’t want to lie to Nona, but I couldn’t tell her the truth either. She was a
by the book
person. She wouldn’t have come along if she’d known where we were going.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you have a friend who works in section M and that just happens to be where we’re standing.”

“George. Yeah, he works in medical, but I see him every day at school. Why would I walk all this way to see someone I’d just seen this afternoon?” I said, not really lying, but definitely not telling the truth.

“Then what are we doing standing ten feet from the clinic, Eva?”

“Honestly, I didn’t know that was the clinic.” At least that was the truth. The brown building looked like it used to be an elementary school. A playground sat beside it, and there was no sign labeling it as a clinic. How were people supposed to know where to go when they were ill if the stinkin’ buildings weren’t labeled?

“Let’s check it out,” I said, pulling Nona with me toward the clinic.

“We aren’t supposed to be here,” she said, struggling to keep up with me.

“Why not? You said it was the clinic. Isn’t this where we’re supposed to go if we need a doctor?”

“I don’t…I guess so.”

“Then come on. If they ask, we’ll tell them the truth. We’re curious if this is the right place to go if we get sick.”

We’d walked up two steps when a voice called out behind us. “Ladies.” I jumped at the booming voice, sucking in a breath to keep from screaming. Nona let out a small gasp. “IDs, please.”

“Crap, Eva, I left my purse at home.”

I turned around slowly. The uniformed man had a rifle unslung and pointed in our general direction. “Um, we don’t have them with us.”