Leave, Scott had told her. Take Macy and get to the cabin. Leave the city, avoid people, don’t draw attention to the fact that you have food and water. Over and over he had repeated the same instructions. Towards the end, his ramblings had taken on a desperate edge; he had known, Naomi was certain, that he wouldn’t be with them. She couldn’t count the number of times he had made her promise – “Say it, Naomi, say you’ll go, say you’ll take her and get to safety, promise me!” – which made her failure to act all that much more painful now.
Naomi leaned her head on the front door and shut her eyes. “Open it,” she whispered to herself. “Just open it. Just start small.”
She put her hand on the door knob and went light-headed with terror. Danger. Danger everywhere outside that door. She could feel it, as surely as she felt her heart booming against her ribs. She stepped back, and looked down at Persephone, who was looking up at her patiently. The little dog scooched over until she was resting against Naomi’s leg, a gesture of support rather than of demand. Naomi reached down and scooped her up, and together they headed for the sheltered back deck, where Macy was resting in the early May sunshine.
She had fallen asleep, Naomi saw as she stepped outside, halfway through a stitch on her embroidery sampler. Naomi lifted the embroidery hoop free of Macy’s hands, tiny, white and spider-like in the wake of her illness, and completed the stitch before setting the sampler aside. She tucked Macy’s blankets more snugly around her, then sat down on the other lounge chair to watch her baby sleep and think through her options.
She didn’t want to go. This was home, security, safety. They had enough food to last several more months, and summer was coming – she could garden to supplement their canned and dried stores. Power and water were her biggest concerns – the lights had been flickering for days, sometimes going out for hours at a time, and every morning, she heaved a huge sigh of relief when the tap responded and the toilet flushed. The failure of both systems was simply a matter of time. She had a back-up generator, but Scott had warned her about the dangers of using it, how the noise might draw attention she didn’t want.
It was tempting, so, so tempting, to plan to hunker down here. To ride it out until the plague had run its course and the world began to recover. Scott knew her homebody self well, knew she’d feel that way – hence his demands for repeated promises to leave. Staying in the city, he had insisted, was far too dangerous. Looters, gangs, rioting and fires, secondary diseases from the lack of sanitation and unburied bodies – over and over, he’d listed those dangers.
Naomi hadn’t had contact with anyone other than Scott or Macy for over a month, and hadn’t heard any current news in almost that long. She had stopped trying Piper’s cell, though she kept the phone nearby, just in case. She had no earthly idea what was going on out there. Yesterday, she heard what sounded like distant gunshots, but how could she know for sure? In the early days of their marriage, she and Scott had lived down by Fort Carson – she had heard automatic weapons firing on the practice range just about every day, and had become used to the sound. The city was so quiet now – was she hearing training exercises from Fort Carson again? Even as the thought crossed her mind, she recognized the desperate rationalization in it.
She needed information. In the absence of TV, radio and internet, there was only one way to get it. She needed to go out there. Out the front door.
She stood up and put Persephone on a stay, leaving her to watch over Macy’s sleep. The little dog was more reliable than a monitor for letting Naomi know when Macy needed her, racing to find Naomi when Macy wanted help getting to the bathroom or a drink of juice – Naomi wasn’t sure what she’d do without her at this point. She more than earned what little food she consumed, and in spite of her promise to Scott about the pets, Persephone would be staying.
Of the other animals, Ares was the only one left. When the weather warmed up, she had released all three cats into the back yard. She had put out food for a few days, then every other day. Cats, she knew, were brilliant at learning to fend for themselves. Artemis had vanished almost immediately, and she had only seen Athena a few times before she, too, disappeared. Naomi had no way of knowing whether the cats had headed for richer hunting grounds or had become prey themselves, but her heart was peaceful over it. She could not bear seeing an animal neglected or abused by humans, but the natural cycle of life and death was a different matter.
Ares, though, had been coming and going with regularity. Sometimes, she only knew he’d been there by the gifts he left on the deck – dead squirrels, chipmunks and birds. Some nights, he yowled to be let in at the door, which invariably signaled a change in the weather. She had started watching the sky, noticing the direction and strength of the wind, and she was getting pretty good at predicting when he’d show up.
Tonight probably wouldn’t be one of those nights, she mused, as she retraced her steps to the front door. The day was soft and clear, a gentle spring day in the Rockies, without even a hint of clouds building over Cheyenne Mountain. A perfect afternoon. Just right for a short walk around the neighborhood, to see what was what. She reached for the front door again.
Danger. Naomi stood there, hand resting on the door knob, torn between frustration and fear. If she couldn’t even open her front door and step out onto the stoop, what hope was there, long-term, for her and Macy?
“Get over it,” she ordered herself in a soft mutter. “Stop being such a coward. Open the damn door.”
She sucked in a deep breath, and twisted the knob with sweaty fingers.
The front lawn was overgrown in patches, and brown where winter-kill hadn’t been treated. Naomi stepped across the threshold and broadened her perspective to the neighboring houses, and the houses across the street. The signs of trouble were like repeated slaps. She should have expected to see them, but they shocked her just the same.
Across the street, the Sullivan’s front door was wide open. She could see boxes and suitcases stacked just inside the door, but leaves and trash had blown in to rest against them. The door had been open at least a few days, maybe longer. Naomi stepped onto the front sidewalk and took a few steps, reaching towards the Sullivans’ home with all her senses. It felt still, completely still.
When she reached the end of her driveway, she stopped, examining each house from where she stood. Garage doors stood open that were usually closed. One house had all the front windows boarded up with plywood. And was that…a body? Naomi strained to see, and forced herself to move closer, shuffling sideways down the street, ready to run in an instant.
It was a body, a woman – she knew the family by sight, but didn’t know their names. She was curled on the ground between what had to be graves, two mounds of dirt scratched in the front yard – her children? A mottled gray arm was flung over one of the mounds, as if embracing a sleeping child, and Naomi could see where the woman had hemorrhaged, coughing her life out just as Scott had done.
For a long moment, she stood there, waiting to feel something. Shouldn’t she? Wasn’t she supposed to feel shock, sorrow, horror? There was a woman dead in her front yard, her body slowly dissolving back into the earth, a woman she had known well enough to wave at when they passed in the street. Had she spent all her grief on Scott, that she had nothing to give this quiet corpse?
She moved to the middle of the street and scanned both directions, looking for any signs of life. From her vantage point, she could see about 20 homes. Down the street, a cat scooted across the asphalt and disappeared into the weeds. Other than the soft, rise-and-fall shush of the wind and the occasional call of a bird, the world was absolutely silent. Naomi glanced back at her house and decided to check one block deeper into the neighborhood. She didn’t want to be gone longer than a few minutes.
Hunching her shoulders, she crept along the side of the road, wincing at the loud crunch of gravel under the sandals she’d slipped on. Silly, pretty, strappy sandals adorned with beachy blue and green beads. Stupid shoes for this task – she had to start thinking such things through. She didn’t know what was worse – the houses where nothing looked amiss, or the discrepancies that signaled trouble: a minivan with all the doors flung wide, just sitting in a driveway; another home with two bodies in the front yard, tangled together in death like lovers; several vehicles parked in driveways with a driver slumped motionless behind the wheel.
And every time the breeze lifted, it brought with it the scent of rot. She knew, of course, what the source of the smell was, but she didn’t want to dwell on it.
As soon as she had been able to leave Macy for any length of time, she had moved all her belongings out of the bedroom she’d shared with Scott, and had sealed the door shut with layer after layer of plastic and tape. When Macy could leave her bed, they’d had a ceremony, there in the hall, in front of the bedroom door. She had calligraphied his name on the wall beside the door, as well as the dates of his birth and his death, and Macy had used some of her precious strength to embellish her father’s memorial with glitter and stickers. Scott’s remains would have to rest in his unorthodox tomb for the foreseeable future, and Naomi knew he was one of the lucky ones. So many, so very many dead, and no one to care for them.
The breeze also stirred the trash, which was everywhere in what had once been a pristine neighborhood. Animals, she guessed. There hadn’t been any trash pick-up since the start of the quarantine, and animals would certainly have been drawn by the smell. Maybe pets, who had escaped from their homes or been set loose, like Artemis and Athena. Dogs would have the worst of it, she pondered as she trudged along. Cats retained their hunting instincts no matter how domesticated. Dogs, for the most part, were more dependent on humans, and would have to overcome more conditioning to kill for food.
As if she’d conjured him, she heard a low whuff from the doorway of the house she was passing. Sitting on the front porch, still and watchful, was one of the largest Rottweilers she had ever seen. When her gaze met his, he whuffed again, ears alert. She stopped walking, and he cocked his head to the side, studying her.
Anxiety. Not hers, his. It rolled off him – that, and hunger. Naomi blinked, startled. She had always been good at reading an animal’s body language, especially dogs. It was a knack she’d simply always had, and that knack had been further honed by her years of work with rescued animals. But this was more than reading posture, gaze and ear position – it felt like his thoughts had touched hers.
She wasn’t scared of him, not for an instant. She kept her body turned to the side – to face him fully might telegraph a challenge – and he rose to his feet. For pity’s sake, even lean as he was, he had to weigh 150 pounds. He turned, looked over his shoulder at her, trotted through the open door, then turned to look at her again.
Naomi surprised herself with a rusty chuckle – it had been a long time since she had felt amusement of any kind. The big guy was exhibiting what she had always called “Timmy’s in the well!” behavior – he so obviously wanted her to follow him, it was as if he could speak.
“I’m coming, boy. That’s a good boy – I’ll follow you.”
She paused in the doorway, seriously doubting the wisdom of what she was doing. The door had been gnawed and dug open – the dog’s strength and determination to be free awed her. Surprising, then, that he hadn’t taken off. She heard the click of his claws on the hardwood ahead of her, and crept farther into the dim house.
She smelled them before she saw them. The man was lying on the couch, the woman slumped on the floor beside him. Both dead, and had been for some time. Naomi lifted the neck of her t-shirt over her nose and breathed through her mouth. The dog stood by them, anxious, vigilant, and whined softly. Help. His eyes were liquid with sorrow.
Naomi shook her head. “I’m sorry, boy. I can’t do anything for them.”
The dog’s ears pricked at her voice, and he whined again. He padded away from the couple, leading her up a half-flight of stairs to what appeared to be bedrooms. He bypassed the first, entered the second. From her vantage point, Naomi could see soft lavender paint on the walls. She edged closer, glimpsed the corner of a white crib with frilly white bedding, and flattened herself against the wall. No. No, she could not go in there. Could not.
The dog re-emerged and stared at her until she met his gaze, then tried his “follow me” behavior again. Walk away, look back, whine. Help. His distress was a pressure in her brain. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she choked, as if he could understand her. “Please, I can’t.”
He whined again, softly, and disappeared into the bedroom. Naomi shut her eyes and tilted her head back against the wall. She had to get out of here, had to get back to Macy. But what if the baby in that room was still alive?
She didn’t give herself time to think or agonize, just pushed away from the wall and swung into the room. The dog was sitting beside the crib, vigilant once more. Naomi smelled blood and corruption, and she knew, even before she saw the tiny, chubby arm, out-flung and discolored, saw the slitted, staring eyes. She reached into the crib and pulled the soft, fluffy afghan over the baby’s face, tucking it gently around her still form. Then she looked at the dog.
“You’re a good dog. Good boy.”
She turned to leave, and he followed her. As she walked back through the house, she saw further evidence of his desperation – he had clawed open all the cupboard doors as well as the refrigerator, looking for food, even as he had staunchly guarded the decomposing corpses of his little family.
She hurried back home, anxious to make sure Macy was okay, with the dog right on her heels the whole way. She stepped through her front door and he followed then sat, as if looking for direction.
“Well, I guess this is your new home, big guy. We’ll check on our girls then get you some food. And you’re going to need a name.”
She ignored Scott’s voice, scolding in her head, as she bustled out to the deck. Macy was still sleeping, but Persephone shot off the lounge chair when she spotted the strange dog, quivering with excitement and anxiety. The two sniffed and sniffed, rigidly at first, then with growing enthusiasm and warmth. Finally, the big Rottweiler settled down with a sigh and laid his head on his paws. Persephone curled up next to him – her whole body wasn’t even as big as his head. Naomi left them like that and went to find the newcomer some food.
She scrubbed and scrubbed her hands and arms in the kitchen sink. By now, she was fairly certain she wasn’t going to get the plague, and Macy had already survived it, but she couldn’t be too careful. She tried, and failed, to forget the cold rigidity of the baby’s corpse when she had tucked the afghan around it, so unlike the warm resilience of a living, sleeping baby. Poor, poor tiny girl – gone before she had lived.
Naomi was not a spiritual person. She took her children to church with regularity because that’s what her parents had done, and made sure they attended Sunday school and vacation bible school. If people asked, she said she was Christian, because that was the way she was raised. But in all honesty, it didn’t interest her as it did some, didn’t consume her as it did others. Religion had never made her feel much at all.
Until now. Now, she was pissed.
“You listen to me, God,” she muttered as she scrubbed. “That baby! Why did you let her even be born, just to take her back so soon? Seems to me you let her down. Seems to me you’ve been letting a lot of people down.”
Naomi scrubbed harder for a few minutes, then stopped. She stared out the window over her kitchen sink, where she could see the top of Cheyenne Mountain over the neighbor’s roof. She ran her eyes along the familiar ridgeline and imagined herself there, among the pines, hearing only the wind. Then she firmed her mouth and spoke again.
“Okay, God, I want you to know I’m grateful that you let Macy stay. I don’t know why you had to take Scott, but I know some people lost a lot more, and I’m grateful for Macy. And I’m grateful for Piper – I know she’s still alive. I can feel her. But here’s the deal: You need to do right by that baby girl. You need to make sure you take her soul to you, or you give her another chance, whatever it is that happens. She never had a chance to ride a pony, or play dress-up, or fall in love.” Naomi shook her head. “Not fair. It’s just not fair, God. If I can’t believe you’re fair on some level, I don’t know what I can believe.”
Naomi dried her hands, then got Zeus’ old feed dish from the cupboard and scooped some of his food into it. It wasn’t ideal – Zeus’ food was formulated for older dogs with joint problems – but it would have to do. She carried the bowl out to the deck, where the sun was starting to slide towards the top of the mountains. Both dogs lifted their heads when she stepped outside, and the big Rottie shot to his feet as soon as he scented the food. Naomi sat down cross-legged on the deck and started feeding him, handful by handful, so he wouldn’t bolt the food and be sick. His whole body shook, but he took the food from her hand as delicately as Persephone would have.
“You need a name,” she mused. She examined his collar for a name tag while he chewed, but found only his license and rabies tags. “I’ve been on a Greek gods kick – that’s what Scott called it.” Pain tightened across her chest, and she breathed deep, trying to warm and loosen the constriction around her heart. She missed his gentle teasing, so much. “We lost him, just like you lost your people. We’re all just trying to survive, see?”
She fed him the last handful of food, then let him snuff around the bowl for a minute. When he finally accepted the food was gone, he heaved an enormous sigh and settled down next to her, watching her with ancient eyes. After a minute or so, he scooted closer, so that his nose was resting against her hand. Another minute, and she felt a tiny, grateful lick touch her palm.
“What a sweet, sweet boy you are. Brave and true.” She considered. “‘Hercules’ is too cliché, don’t you think? And ‘Apollo’ isn’t right – I’m pretty sure he was a blonde.”
Persephone trotted over to settle against the big dog’s side as if she’d known him her whole life, and just like that, Naomi knew his name. “You’re ‘Hades.’ Now, don’t look at me like that – he’s not the god of the dead, he’s the ruler of the underworld – there’s a big difference. He’s Persephone’s consort, and even though he kidnapped her, I like to think they grew to love each other. He could be cruel, it’s true, and he was stern, but he was also fair and just.”
Naomi smoothed both hands over Hades’ head, learning the silkiness of his ears, the sturdiness of his skull, the bulky muscle of his neck and shoulders. His eyes slid shut under her stroking and she felt his anxiety ease, as surely as she’d eased his hunger – he had been as starved for affection and comfort as he had been for food. Beside her, Macy stirred, and Hades lifted his head.
Macy’s eyes fluttered open. She stretched, yawned with a soft, humming sound, then went still when she spotted the big Rottweiller. Before Naomi could say a word, Macy’s face bloomed into a glorious smile. She beamed at Naomi with shining eyes.
“I knew he’d come! I dreamed him!” She reached out a hand, and Hades shuffled on his stomach over to her. He pressed his head into her caress with a soft, joyous whine.
Naomi felt the hair on the back of her neck tingle and lift. She was seeing…a reunion. Not a first-time meeting. “You dreamed about him?” She was proud of her casual tone. “When?”
“When I was really sick,” Macy answered matter-of-factly. “He said he was coming to us, that I needed to stay. That you needed me to stay.”
“He talked to you?” Naomi couldn’t tell if she sounded casual any more, and didn’t much care. Something was moving underneath the surface of this exchange, something she just wasn’t ready to deal with.
“Of course he didn’t talk to me, not like people do,” Macy scoffed. “You know what I mean. When you feel what animals feel, you just know. Like you knew how he felt when you saw him with his other family. You knew he was worried about them, and you knew you didn’t need to be afraid of him.”
“Macy,” Naomi whispered, all pretext of “casual” forgotten. “How did you know about that? I didn’t tell you that. You weren’t there.”
“I dreamed that, too.” Seeing the distress on her mother’s face, she leaned over and patted her on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Mama. I dreamed a lot of weird things when I was sick.” Her face slid into a crafty grin, and Naomi nearly wept with joy at seeing it. “I dreamed you were so happy I lived, you bought me my very own horse - a beautiful, pure white Arabian!”
Naomi’s tears escaped her, leaving her sobbing and laughing at the same time. The ploy was so Piper-like – it made her miss her oldest daughter, the pain a deep slice across her heart, even as she reveled in the living, breathing humor of her baby. “Did you really? What else did you dream, you little opportunist?”
Macy’s face went still, her eyes growing distant, and Naomi was instantly sorry she had asked. “I dreamed of Piper. She’s alive, Mama, but she’s in danger. It’s going to take you a long time to find her – a very long time. But you can’t give up, no matter what. You can’t stop looking for her. She’s going to need you to help her fix her heart.”
“What else?” Naomi whispered. She desperately didn’t want to know, but to not ask felt like the most cowardly course. She couldn’t take it. “What else do I need to know, baby?”
“Daddy. I dream of him all the time. He stays close, for…later…”
Cold, cold to her bones, cold slicing to her very marrow. Terror made her angry, and she struggled to keep the bite of it out of her voice. “Macy. Love. Daddy is gone. We talked about this.”
Macy reached out and gentled her with a soft palm against her cheek, comforting her a second time. “I know, Mama. It’s okay. Hey, is there any soup? I think I could eat some…”
Clever girl, Naomi thought, watching as her daughter ruffled Hades’ ears, then gave Persephone a stroke for fairness. Knows just how to distract her mother. Macy’s appetite still hadn’t returned, and she desperately needed to put some weight back on. She was frail to the point of fragile, and though she did her best to eat the nutritious dishes her mother fixed her, eating exhausted her.
“I’ll get some. Do you want to eat out here?”
“Yeah, that would be good. I’ll just stay here and get to know Hades. Thanks, Mama.”
Naomi paused in the doorway, watching as Persephone hopped up to curl against Macy’s side, and Hades rested his head on the lounge chair, eyes closed, while Macy stroked his ears. Then she went to heat up a cup of the rich chicken noodle soup she had fixed yesterday. Not until she was headed out with a tray, attractively arranged with crackers and some canned fruit, did her footsteps falter.
Macy had known Hades’ name.