Quarantined by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page B

from home during those days that I didn’t even know what my daughter was into anymore. She used to be all about birds, every kind of bird, and even though she still wore the pajamas, I didn’t know if birds were still cool.
    “Is it still birds?” I asked.
    Billy smiled and nodded.
    “I wish we could get her something bird-related. I don’t know. A book maybe?”
    “I’ve got something to show you,” Billy said, and crossed the room to the bookshelf, where he took down a few books and carefully removed what looked like a cigar box he’d hidden back there.
    “What is it?” I whispered.
    “Something I’ve been working on,” he said, “out in the shed, while Connie’s in here reading.”
    He pulled out a bird and handed it to me. It was hand carved from oak wood, polished smooth, painted with exacting and loving detail. It was a blue jay, a perfect likeness, right down to the wrinkles on its claws.
    I took it in my hands delicately, like it was made of glass.
    I could feel a tear threatening to break loose.
    “Her favorite right now is the gray barn owl. I’ve already got one of those made too, but it’s too big to put in the box. I have it out in the shed. I’m gonna start on a nest for it tomorrow.”
    I looked up at him, and the tear fell.
    “Hey,” he said, kneeling next to me, taking my face in his hands. “Hey, it’s all right. We’re all right.”
    I closed my eyes and lost myself in his hands. Such wonderful hands.
    “I love you so much, Billy. God, so much.”
    “I love you too, Lily. Always.”
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Chapter 8
    I kept a journal of the flu. It wasn’t anything as organized as a diary, more a collection of random thoughts and feelings, and sometimes news clippings. But peppered throughout the entries were little flashes of inspiration, things I thought were as powerful as a wildfire, and just as temporary. I felt I had to put them down on paper, else they’d become ashes, flavorless and without meaning, only the echo of something that had once burned hot within me.
    In looking over it now, I saw a lot of those flashes, all of them written in an urgent, slashing hand, like I was trying to carve them into the paper. Yet it pained me to realize that nothing of the desperate need that prompted me to write them down survived.
    One passage read:
    This morning, through the fog and the clean, brisk smell of the Vespers Creek, two deer. A mother and her baby. Must tell Connie about this, when she’s older. Nature can be kind and beautiful, too. Death is not all there is.
    I could only guess at the emotions that prompted me to write that, for I no longer had them readily on tap. Like the memory of the scene, the words were no longer vivid and vibrant in my mind. Only gray survived.
    H2N2.
    My journal was filled with my thoughts and observations about this killer version of the influenza virus. I realized, as I read the journal over again, that I’ve studied it, taken in details of its killing spree, in the same way that a condemned man might read about the mechanical operation of the gallows. It is both good and horrible to talk with Death when you know he’s sitting at your table.
    The bird flu is not something that just happened one day in rural China. Every version of the influenza virus, and there are literally millions, regardless of its particular arrangement of hemagglutin and neuraminidase, finds its natural home in the intestinal track of wild aquatic birds. Very rarely does a mutated strain make the jump to the human respiratory system.
    Several years back, it was the H5N1 version of the flu that the news told us to fear. We were told rural China, with its millions of chickens interacting with wild migratory birds in abominable conditions, would be ground zero for the worst influenza plague the world had ever seen. Bigger even than the pandemic that wrote the year 1918 on fifty million tombstones the world over.
    Few thought of H2N2, for it had already had its time on the world stage back