Page 1 of What Remains

Chapter 1

Morning News & Dark Truths

The air in the kitchen was filled with the scent of dark roast and toast – normal, expected. The light from outside filtered through the blinds in stripes that moved across the table, where Mark sat, half-obscured by the paper. Over the counter, the television provided its usual background chatter, delivering with cheerful briskness a report of "an early and aggressive flu season" with infection rates rising, hospitals reaching capacity and patients having nowhere to go.

Josie walked into the kitchen in bare feet, hair just washed, hanging wet and plastered to her forehead, drab scrubs clinging to her form. She took a mug from the cabinet and, despite the ominous warning coming from the television, the sound of the porcelain seemed to rise above it.

She glanced over her shoulder at her husband.

"I really don't think this is the flu, love," she poured herself the coffee and her hands only trembled slightly. "Janson said the ER has been swamped. It's… pretty deadly from what I've been seeing."

Mark looked up from his reading with tired eyes and flashed her a smile that never quite touched them.

"I'm sure it's nothing, love," he turned another page as though dismissing whatever worries this news may bring. "They always blow this stuff out of proportion."

Josie frowned, feeling something coiling in her guts like fear. She had seen enough flu seasons to recognize normal and abnormal. Patients coding minutes after admission. Delirium becoming violent and uncontrollable. Confusion to the point when grown men forgot their names. Persistent fever resisting all their efforts to cool it.

But she did not press further. Why would she? There was no way Mark would listen until he had to and something in her refused to say this words out loud—as though saying them might make it real.

She chose safe topics instead.

"I need to take Layla to dance class tonight," she said, spreading butter on the toast quickly. "But I have late surgical consult with the new patient. Could you take her?"

"Mm-hmm," he nodded and went back to his reading, eyes already sliding back to the paper. "I've got it."

The sirens sounded in the distance – one and another. Josie stopped in her tracks and looked out the window, counting them the way she would seconds between the lightning and thunder.

Mark remained oblivious to that as always.

She picked her toast and moved behind him, kissing him on the cheek, breathing the aftershave she always knew since before they married. "Hold down the fort," she whispered.

"I always do," he replied, lost in his paper.

She managed to make it halfway out of the kitchen before hearing it – a cough.

It tore from his chest, the sound of something deep inside him. The newspaper slipped in his hands, corners folding in.

Josie reached out to the doorframe and grasped it.

Mark cleared his throat again, harsher this time, took a sip of his coffee and his wedding ring clinked against the porcelain.

"Just dry air," he said and his voice sounded a bit higher than usual, off.

Her medical education assessed everything before her heart could catch up – the flush creeping up his cheeks, the sweat on his forehead, the way his shoulders hunched forward as though bracing against something. Everything that she charted on patients in the previous days sat right there in front of her – symptoms of her own husband.

Outside, another siren sounded and the neighbor's dog started howling with it, mournful and long.

She paused in the doorway, not knowing whether she should go or not, looking at golden stripes of light, the toast crumbs, the spilled coffee, and her husband who pretended he was not sick. There was something about this late summer that brought a deviation which was yet to be named—but looking at Mark she understood with chilling certainty that this morning would be the last time when everything was normal.

Seth bolted upright in the bed, breathing heavily, sweat dripping from his body. His t-shirt stuck to him, damp and twisted around his chest as if the nightmare was trying to drag him and hold him there. They haunted him now - every night, the same unbearable moment when everything he loved slipped through his fingers while he could not do anything about it. Even awake, the nightmare remained, filling his veins and refusing to go away.

The aisle of the store appeared around him, shelves full of canned food and boxes of goods in silent rows. A single cart stood in the middle of the aisle and hung over the handle of it – AJ's baby blanket, blue and covered with rockets.

Molly bought it before they even knew if they were having a boy or a girl.

"Molly?" he whispered, looking around in the dark.

No answer.