Her parents stayed in bed the next day, too. Raina brought them water and broth. They were pale and the room smelled wrong. The Kleenex in the trash beside the bed were spotted with blood.
That evening, her parents argued. Blankets rustled. Drawers scraped. Her dad walked out. He was dressed, but his brown face was waxy. Sweat dewed his temples.
“Get your shoes.” His voice was thick. “We’re going to the hospital. Can’t leave you alone.”
On the drive, the only sound was their wet coughing.
Cars jammed the hospital parking lot. Sirens spun. Lights painted the crowds red and blue. There were tents in the lot like they were selling the cars parked there. Her dad had to park three blocks away. Hundreds of people stood back from the front doors, where uniformed men in bug-like masks held long guns. People shouted and pressed forward. The men lifted their guns and yelled, and the crowds fell back.
“Martin.” Her mom grabbed her dad’s arm. “They’ll never let us in there.”
“They have to. We’re sick.”
“Look around. Everyone’s sick. And if we stay, Raina will be, too.”
He blinked, skin pulled tight over his face. “Come on.”
As they walked away, a gun went off. Men and women screamed. The three of them ran to the car and drove home.
Her mom trudged back to bed, shoulders jerking as she coughed into her fist. Raina’s dad bent down in front of her. The heat from his face was like afternoon sand.
“What’s going on?” Raina asked.
“We don’t feel good. But we’ll get better soon. Can you make yourself dinner?”
“Do you want some?”
“Not now.” He reached out to touch her arm, then stopped. A bead of sweat slipped down his nose. “Keep the front door locked, okay?”
“Okay.”
He turned, then stopped and looked back, a vein pulsing in his brow. “If something… happens. Wait for help. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He went to his room and shut the door. Raina turned off the lights and sat beside the window blinds, where one of the slats was broken. She peered through it to the intersection down the street. Normally, headlights streamed through the break in the blinds long after dark. That night, seconds passed between each car. Sirens whooped past every few minutes.
Raina only left her post to get food, use the bathroom, or bring her parents water. A day and a half into her vigil, her head snapped up from a doze. It took her a minute to understand what had woken her.
They’d stopped coughing.
Raina shot to her feet, heart heavy with dread. She took two steps toward their door and stopped. What if it would only be true if she opened the door and looked in? What if they’d needed her but she’d been asleep and they’d been too weak to get up and wake her? She sank to the stained, threadbare carpet. She knew what waited on the other side of the door. The worst thing in the world.
And that was why she had to stand up and make herself see.
The door creaked. The room smelled like blood and waste. Raina watched them for several minutes, then closed the door again. She went to her bed and lay down and wept. When she was done, she went back to the broken slat to watch the street.
Like one of the windup toys she’d had when she was little, the city seemed to stall, shudder forward, and stop. No more sirens. No more little planes burbling through the sky all afternoon. No more men walking their pit bulls. No more older kids hanging outside the Wendy’s and laughing too loud.
But her dad had told her what she needed to do. So Raina stayed at the window and waited.
Three days after she’d opened the door to the bedroom—three days alone in the silence waiting for help—the phone rang. Raina snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Hi there,” a man said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “And who’s this?”
“Raina.” Too late, she knew this was the wrong thing to say. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend. Of your parents. Are you alone?”
Raina went still. “No.”
“Who’s there?” the man said. “Your parents?”
“That’s right. They’re in the other room.”
“Are they sick?”
“They’re fine.”
“Is that so. Then can I speak to them, Raina?”
She stared across the kitchen. “Hang on.”
Raina set the phone on the counter. As the man waited, she got the backpack she’d used for school. She got toilet paper and her toothbrush and the Tupperware of rice and beans she’d boiled. She emptied out the tail of a Pepsi two-liter and filled it with water. She got socks and underwear and a bag of the Bugles her dad liked.
Had liked.
Raina went to the front door, the man’s voice squawking from the phone back in the kitchen. He sounded angry, now. Like a man who wanted her parents to be dead. She went back to the kitchen and got the long, thin knife from the block. The same one she’d used to cut peppers and onions for dinner just a few days earlier.
Outside, crows scolded from the tile roofs. There was no sound of traffic. She didn’t know where she was going but she knew she needed to get away from the house and the lying, angry man on the phone. It was spring and the streets were wet from rain. Cars were parked at odd angles in the middle of the street. Others were crashed together and left behind. Sometimes she heard an engine far away, but that only made the silences in-between all the louder.
Shards of glass glittered on the sidewalk where shop windows had been punched out. At the corner, the Walgreens was torn apart, deodorant and shampoo bottles littering the entrance. Raina wandered down a side street. The front doors hung open like dark mouths at some houses. The people who owned them had abandoned them. If she wanted, she could walk in and make them her own.
But she doubted they were truly empty. She thought they had rooms like her parents’, where people slept forever in their bloody beds.
Los Angeles was gone. But what if the sickness hadn’t gotten to other places? She could go north. Santa Barbara. Her parents had taken her there when she was younger. It was pretty there. Maybe it wasn’t so silent and still. Maybe she could find help.
An hour later, with the clouds drizzling rain onto the apartments and strip malls, something growled at her from beneath a shrub. Raina stopped. A stout, black Chihuahua trotted out, hackles raised.
“Hi,” she said. “Are you scared?”
She crouched and held out her hand. The dog leaned warily forward, sniffing. It backed up a step, then leaned in and sniffed her again, its nose catching a whiff from her pack.
“I’ve got food.” She glanced down the street and shrugged out of her backpack. “Are you hungry?”
She opened the container of rice and beans and scooped a few bites out with her fingers. The Chihuahua edged closer, nostrils whuffing. He licked her hand, spilling grains of spicy rice to the sidewalk. He gobbled these up, so Raina dropped more to the ground. When the dog finished that too, she dug another scoop from the Tupperware, and he ate it from her hand.
“Hey!” A man’s voice echoed down the street. “Hey, you!”
He was two blocks away. A grown-up. The man leaned forward, breaking into a jog. Something about the way he moved felt wrong. He looked like a dog going after a squirrel. She shoved the food into her backpack and ran the other way.
“Hey!”
His shoes pounded the wet sidewalk. Raina darted down an alley that cut between two rows of houses. At the first open door, she ran inside. It smelled like her parents’ room. She found an empty bedroom and scampered under the bed.
Outside, the man’s shouts grew wrathful. That was the way of things now: with everything else taken, the only thing people had left was their anger.