Never Walk Alone Read online

  “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve been gone for a while,” the nurse said. “You’ve been in an induced coma for four weeks, so you don’t know. Yesterday, the doctors believed you were improving, so they decided to get you off the ventilator and out of the coma. But a lot has happened in the four weeks you were out. Quite a lot, to be honest.”

  “I…I’m sick?” Reese asked.

  The nurse nodded. “Yes. You were. You’re better now. We need to run a couple more tests, but it seems like you beat this thing. You had double pneumonia along with the virus, and it almost killed you.”

  “Virus?”

  “Oh, I forgot. You’ve been out, so you haven’t heard. There’s a virus that has placed everything on lockdown. It goes by several names. The Florida Flu or the Miami Virus. They gave it those names because it is believed to have originated here in Miami.”

  Reese swallowed. She felt confused.

  “So…you’re telling me there’s some virus here in Miami?”

  The nurse nodded. “Yes. I know it’s a lot to take in right now, and the doctor told me to take it easy on you, break it to you gently, so you won’t get overwhelmed. You can rest now if you like, then I’ll come back later, and we can talk more. Unfortunately, we’re really pressed for time and space these days as more and more patients roll in, so I fear that there won’t be much time.”

  “But…wait…you’re telling me the entire town is on lockdown because of this?”

  She nodded. “Not just the town. The world. People have been told to stay at home. Schools are closed, restaurants are shut down, all sports events are canceled, concerts too. People are told to work from home, and only essential workers get to leave, like us, nurses and doctors, and people working in grocery stores. They don’t know how long it’ll last. They’re only allowed to leave if they need to get medicine or food, and even for that, most people are only allowed to go out once a week and only one person from each household. It’s a mess. In here, we’re struggling to fit all the patients, and we don’t have enough equipment to deal with this. It hits the youngest the hardest, and we’re struggling to save the kids.”

  “But…but where did it come from?” Reese asked, feeling anxiety grow in her chest. She was in her forties, so maybe that was why she had survived? But what about the children? The horror of this was unbearable.

  The nurse sighed. Another alarm went off, and Reese could tell she was about to leave when she reached out and grabbed her suit.

  “Please, tell me. Do they know where the virus came from?”

  The nurse paused and exhaled. “They were kind of hoping you could help them figure that out.”

  “Me? How so?”

  “Because you were patient zero. You were the first known patient to get it.”

  Chapter 5

  “What if I just don’t do it?”

  My fourteen-year-old-daughter looked up at me from behind the computer screen, leaned back in her chair, and crossed her arms in front of her chest, reminding me of when she was a lot younger and refused to do something I told her to.

  “Then I guess you’ll get a bad grade on it,” I said with an exhale.

  Homeschooling due to the lockdown had proved to be a lot harder than I expected. Usually, my daughter was very independent and could take care of things like this almost on her own. But being stuck inside and not being able to see any of her friends had made her angry at the world, and she liked to take that out on me. I knew it was just because she was actually feeling anxious. I guess we all were scared, living through something like this. The biggest question of all being, will this ever end?

  Of course, we feared the virus, too; I most certainly feared Josie getting it. With her history of heart disease, she was in the high-risk group. That’s why we had kept her indoors for the past four weeks. My dad had moved in with us, so he could keep an eye on her while I went to work. As a detective, I was essential and had to go out in the streets and make sure people were safe, even if it meant me risking bringing the virus home with me.

  My girlfriend Jean was working non-stop at the ER, and we had decided not to see one another while this was going on, to minimize the risk of infection for Josie. But it was tough. Four weeks without being able to kiss the one you loved was no fun at all. Especially not when you had finally found one another and hadn’t gotten to date for more than a few weeks when the entire world suddenly went crazy.

  The past few weeks had been insane. It was hard to wrap my mind around it.

  “What does it matter if I get a bad grade on it? What do grades matter anyway?” Josie asked. “It’s not like we’re going back to school. I might even not survive this if I get it, so why would I spend my last time on earth doing math?”

  “Because you might actually survive it, and you might actually go back to school in a few weeks when they find a cure or a vaccine for this, and then you’ll end the year with bad grades.”

  I said this, but I didn’t mean it. The fact was, the girl was right. We all knew she probably wouldn’t get to go back to school this year at all. And it seemed so futile to be concentrating on schoolwork when it felt like the entire world was ending. But we had to believe there was something at the end of this, that we’d make it out of this alive. We had to believe that it would all blow over at some point.

  We have to believe that God knows what He’s doing, even when we can’t see it, even if it makes no sense.

  “Please, Josie,” I said and rubbed my stubble. I hadn’t shaved in several days since I had been off the entire weekend. I reminded myself to get it done before reporting for duty later today. “Please, just do the math work, and then you can take the rest of the day off. We can do the science stuff tomorrow if you want. It’s not due till next Monday.”

  Josie stared at me defiantly. But behind all that anger, I saw something else. I saw a sadness I hardly recognized in my usually so happy little girl. She was scared. It was obvious to me, her father, even though she tried her hardest to hide it from me. I couldn’t blame her. Only a month ago, she had seen her mother being taken away to enter the witness protection program and told she’d never get to see her again.

  And now this?

  Why, God? Why do all these terrible things happen to us? Why can’t we catch a break?

  My dad entered the living room just as I shook my head, not knowing what to do about my daughter. I felt his hand on my shoulder. “Here. Let me take over. You need to get ready for work anyway.”

  I nodded, realizing that was why Josie was extra defiant today. Because I was going back to work after two days at home, she was worried about me; of course, she was. She was anxious about everything these days and had no way of putting her anxiety into words. Instead, she became like a toddler, refusing to obey.

  “I might as well save you the trouble right away. It doesn’t matter what you say. I’m not doing it, Grandpa,” she said. “I don’t want to waste any more time on school.”

  My dad sat down, and I got up. I was about to walk away when my dad folded his hands in front of him and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “So, don’t.”

  I paused. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. He was supposed to convince her to do her math, not the opposite.

  “Dad, I…” I said, but he lifted his finger in the air to stop me. I backed off, deciding to let him deal with it. I had given it my best; if he believed he could do better, then I might as well let him try.

  I walked upstairs and took a shower, then shaved and got dressed. I placed my gun in the holster and attached my badge to the belt. I looked at myself in the mirror, then glanced toward Jean’s house next door. It was empty, and she was probably at work, as usual these days. She only came home to sleep for a few hours before she was off again. If she even came home at all. I missed her terribly. I missed her kisses, holding her hand, and just smelling her skin. I missed her cooking and the sound of her voice. I missed everything about her, and it filled me with such dee
p sadness that I had no idea when I’d really be able to be with her again.

  I walked down the stairs and found Josie sitting at the computer, working. I came up behind her and looked at the screen, then realized she was actually doing her math problems. My dad was in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher and humming. I walked out to him and gave him a look.

  “Okay. How did you do it?”

  “That’s between Josie and me,” he said grinning.

  “Spit out, Dad. How did you do it?”

  He laughed. “I might have promised her a new game for her Nintendo Switch if she finished her work before this afternoon. There’s this game she’s been asking for for a long time, but you keep telling her it’s too expensive. Animal Cropping or something.”

  “Crossing. Animal Crossing,” I said, startled at what I was hearing. My dad was a retired pastor; I had expected him to have a chat with her about how God was using all this to turn people to Him, or maybe how God saw her good deeds, and she’d be rewarded for it later on. Not this.

  “You can’t bribe her.”

  My dad gave me a puzzled look. “Why not? It worked. Look at her.”

  “Yes, it worked…for now. But what about tomorrow? She’s gonna expect to get something every time she finishes some work, and I can’t afford that. You know I can’t. Neither can you. You’re not exactly swimming in money either.”

  “True. But sometimes they need to have something to look forward to. Desperate times call for desperate measures. And these times sure are desperate.”

  I scoffed and took my phone from the counter.

  “I don’t know what I am ever going to do with you. Both of you.”

  Chapter 6

  Reese hadn’t had a minute to herself ever since she woke up from her coma. The next couple of days seemed like a dream—a nightmare mostly. There wasn’t even a second to think about what was going on or what had happened to her. It was all chaos around her. There was a constant stream of people coming in and out of her room. Some were asking her questions, while others rushed in to take blood, take her temperature, or run other tests. Two men from the CDC arrived and told her they were performing what they called contact tracing, then asked her a ton of questions, none of which she knew the answer to.

  “Where were you before you ended up in the hospital?”

  “Who were you in contact with?”

  “Did you travel before contracting the virus?”

  Reese just stared at them, eyes wide, mouth gaping. She was scared. All these eyes looking out at her from behind their hazmat suits. They all wanted something, but she wasn’t sure she could give it to them. From inside their suits, their voices sounded distorted like they were further away than they actually were. Reese struggled to think and felt like she was on trial. She felt sweaty and anxious. How could she explain to them that she didn’t know anything? Would they believe her when she told them that she simply didn’t remember a single thing of what happened before she ended up in the hospital?

  “Please, ma’am, please try to answer our questions. Did you visit family?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did you have contact with any children?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t recall.”

  “Okay, let’s try a different approach. What is the last thing you remember?”

  Reese paused and thought it over for a second. What did she remember, if anything at all? A vision came to her, an image of her in her condo, in the bed. And she wasn’t alone. She was with someone; there was a voice there, another voice. But she couldn’t put a face to it.

  She felt like screaming.

  Why is everything spinning so terribly fast?

  Reese couldn’t focus; she couldn’t picture who was with her in the bed, and that was it. The image went away.

  “I…I just remember being at home,” she said. “I don’t even remember falling ill.”

  “And before you were at your home?” the man asked.

  Reese looked at her fingers. She didn’t know what to tell him.

  “I have never…my memory isn’t very good,” she said. “All I know is what they told me here…that I got sick in a grocery store.”

  “Please, do try and remember,” the man said impatiently. “It’s important.”

  Reese bit her lip and shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “We spoke to your manager where you work, at the CVS on Biscayne Boulevard, and they said you didn’t come in for your shift on the twenty-second of last month. You were there the day before but seemed out of it, he said. You were babbling and sweating and coughing. So, he sent you home. Do you know if you went directly home after that? Or did you have contact with anyone while you were sick and possibly contagious?”

  “I…I don’t think so.” She lied because now she just wanted to be left alone. This was a lot to take in, especially since she was beginning to understand that they believed she was the one who had started it all.

  It all began with her—patient zero.

  “You don’t think so, or do you know for sure?” the man in the hazmat suit asked.

  She shook her head. “No. I went straight home when they told me to.”

  “And you live alone? Am I correct?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  She wasn’t even sure about that part. She had partners from time to time. Some stayed a long time, while others only lasted a few days.

  “Did you have contact with anyone in your building? A neighbor, a friend? Any children?”

  She shook her head again, even though she didn’t know. She simply didn’t remember anything from those days. It was all blacked out except that image of her in the bed, and the sound of someone crying.

  “And you’re sure about this?”

  She nodded and closed her eyes. As the men finally gave up and left, Reese pressed back the tears as they emerged. Two nurses came rushing into her room.

  “We need you out of here. We need your space for more severely ill patients. We’re running out of room and ventilators.”

  She looked up at them. She could still barely walk after weeks in a coma, and now they were throwing her out?

  “But…but where do I go? What if I infect more people?”

  “Your latest tests came back negative,” the nurse said. She was speaking rapidly, almost swallowing the words before they even left her lips. Reese could see in her eyes that she was stressed. Still, she did her best to explain it to Reese, to make sure she understood. “That means there’s no more virus in your body. You’re out of the loop. You can’t infect more people. Many more are getting sick out there and coming in here. Since we don’t have any available beds anymore, we’re discharging you.”

  Reese stared at her, unable to speak. She was still weak and tired and hardly had any time to digest what had happened. She had only been awake for two days and was still coughing and wheezing when she breathed. But apparently, it wasn’t enough anymore. They handed her a bag of pills, told her they had called for a taxi to take her home, then rolled her out of the ICU in a wheelchair. They stopped in the lobby, just as an ambulance rolled up, and another patient was taken in on a stretcher. The nurses didn’t even say goodbye to Reese; they just left her there, then took off after the stretcher.

  Reese rose to her feet and leaned against the wall for support. Breathing heavily, she staggered out the sliding doors, out into the unusually fresh Miami air, to a city where everything stood completely still. Except for the ambulances that were rushing in and out of the hospital, unloading patients before driving down the streets to pick up more that had fallen ill.

  Chapter 7

  We were driving through the deserted city of Miami, my partner and me. Each of us, of course, driving in our own car, complying with the strict social distancing rules for our nation. We had just been going through Overtown, the worst part of town where people usually hang on corners, dealing crack, and found that to be deserted as well as the rest of the city. Not a single soul was in
the streets. Not even a deal going on in a corner or an alley.

  We turned around the building housing the University of Miami’s facility, where the drug addicts usually could exchange their used needles for new ones to stop the spread of HIV and hepatitis among them. But even that was closed these days, leaving the drug addicts to reuse old ones or share needles, endangering themselves.

  I grabbed my radio and told my new partner, Detective Propper, that I was making a stop because I spotted someone on the street. He was sitting in a rusty beach chair that he probably pulled out of a dumpster somewhere.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” I said and got out, grabbing my brown bag with my lunch in hand. I pulled up my mask that the city made us wear to prevent us from getting infected when talking to people.

  “If it isn’t Detective Hunter,” the man in the chair grinned. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Old Man Jones,” I said. “Just checking in. How’re you holding up? You staying safe? Keeping your distance?”

  “Ain’t no one coming close to me,” he said, laughing. “Weren’t before the world went mad, and most certainly aren’t now.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “You better keep at least six feet from everyone these days.”

  Social distancing was hard on the homeless, especially those that lived in the shelters where they slept in close quarters. It wasn’t easy for people with no home to be asked to stay at home. I had known Old Man Jones for years, ever since he ended up on the streets. Due to cancer, he lost his job a couple of years back, and as the medical bills piled up, he could no longer afford a home, so he took to the streets. He wasn’t an addict and usually hung out at the library during the day and spent the nights at one of the city’s homeless shelters. Now, the library was closed, and the shelters no longer allowed for them to drop in and shower or even wash their hands. He didn’t dare to sleep at the shelters anymore due to how close they slept, he had told me recently.

  “If one of them has the virus, I’m done for,” he said. “Better off out here in the fresh air.”