"Sure, mate. Come by next week, or we'll come get you."
The next day Zee took a bus to St. James Park an hour before match time and stood right in front of the gate. And waited.
And waited.
People flooded in around him, but none of those people was Samantha Golton. Or Ben, for that matter, or anyone else he knew
Then, fifteen minutes before match time, he saw one of Samantha's friends a few yards away. He waved and she came toward him.
"Zachary! Hi, I'm Sarah. Sarah Rocklin."
"Pleased to meet you." Zee shook her hand formally, like a well-bred grandson would. "Sam's not here yet?"
Zee shook his head.
"Have you heard anything from her?"
Zee blinked. "Uh, no?"
"Hmmm. She wasn't at practice yesterday, and neither was Padma. Sick, I guess."
"Oh!"
"There's something going around the dorms. I live in Exeter, so I'm not staying there, but training was pretty thin yesterday."
"Yeah, I guess ours was too."
"You guess?"
So Zee told Samantha's friend about his grandmother and the end of his summer and how he really was just there to tell them he couldn't come to the game-he was there because he couldn't be there, if that made any sense-and he had to be home to help his parents, and he was so sorry. He gave Sarah the speech he was going to give Samantha, which of course meant he would have nothing to say to Samantha at all, despite all his careful, considered preparation. Which meant that when Samantha did arrive, he would be left either repeating himself precisely and looking like a nitwit, or just stuttering aimlessly and looking like a nitwit.
But Samantha did not arrive, and neither did Padma. Zee and Sarah waited, and waited, talking of nothing until there was nothing left to talk about. They both began to shift and look at their watches and look off into the distance and shift some more. A half an hour after game time Sarah and Zee looked at each other and shrugged.
"I guess they're not coming," Sarah said uncertainly.
"They couldn't be inside?" Zee asked.
Sarah shook her head. "I've got the tickets."
"Should we call?"
"Sam doesn't have a mobile, and the dorm phone's useless."
"I hope everything's all right," Zee said.
But Zee could not help but feel that things were distinctly not all right. There was something sitting in his stomach, something apart from the hollowness left by his grandmother's death.
Zee couldn't have explained it to you. It didn't make any sense – there was nothing unusual about people getting sick, after all. But suddenly Zee was overcome with a sense of unease- somewhere, somehow, he sensed that something was very, very wrong.
"Um…" Sarah bit her lip. "I think I'll just go over to the dorms and check on them? Maybe they just forgot."
Zee looked at his watch. He was supposed to be back by now, but he knew he couldn't just leave Sarah to go off by herself. And whatever was wrong, he simply had to know.
"I'll come with you," he said.
When Zee and Sarah went to the dorms, they found Samantha, Padma, and most of the other girls in their beds, looking as if some specter had visited them and taken their souls. Sarah immediately called her mother, and soon the girls had been taken off to the hospital. Zee spent the next week calling Sarah for updates, but she never called him back, and soon he learned she had gotten sick too.
The mysterious illness swept through the young people of Exeter. One by one they took to their beds and simply could not get out again. The whole town began to panic. People could talk about nothing else. What on Earth was taking their children?
For it was only the children who were sick; as of yet there wasn't a single case of an adult with the symptoms. Some doctor on the local news one night called it the Pied Piper flu as a result, and the name stuck.
Zee watched as everyone he knew fell ill. He talked to their parents and read the newspaper and listened to various proclamations from doctors, and nothing would quell his unease. His parents weren't helping- they kept threatening to send Zee home on a train, and he had to fight to stay. It wasn't the Piper Flu. Whatever needed to be done for Grandmother Winter, he would do it. Then he could leave.
So his parents quizzed him every day on his health. But Zee was fine. Whatever had ailed him was passing-day by day he felt less dizzy, less tired. Perhaps he had gotten the thing and it had affected him differently. Perhaps his immune system had fought it off. Perhaps he had never had it at all.
It seemed he was the only one.
His club called off the rest of their season for lack of a team, and the football camps were shut down. By the end of that week everyone Zee knew in Exeter, including Samantha, had been fetched by worried parents and taken home.
The only good news was that none of the kids seemed to be getting any worse-everyone stayed exactly the same. From the little Zee could gather, no one could find anything physically wrong with any of them. No one could explain their complete collapse. And no one could make them better. All anyone knew was that the Piper Flu was entirely confined to Exeter, and it didn't seem to be contagious – there weren't any new cases developing around the afflicted kids who had been taken elsewhere.
The Millers themselves left Exeter two weeks after Grandmother Winter died. They had sold her house and closed her accounts and sold off her furniture-except for the big green easy chair, which Mrs. Miller was having shipped home. The Millers may have hurried things a little at the end, but they didn't tell Zee that. They needed to get out of there. Whatever plague or poison or fungus or flu had felled Exeter's children would not get their boy.
It was with a tremendous sense of relief that the family found London was as hale and hearty as it had been when they left. Zee called all his friends and found them quite well, thank you. He met with his best friends, Phillip and Garth, for dinner the day after he got back, and they were quite well too, and all their friends were quite well, and for one night Zee put away the Piper Flu and that big ol' uneasy lump. Football practice would start in two weeks and school in four, so the boys resolved to spend the rest of their summer enjoying themselves as much as they possibly could before the exigencies of school put fun to a tragic end.
As for Samantha Golton, Zee stopped off at Nicki's house on the day he got back to find that Samantha had been taken to the south of France with her family. Nicki didn't know much more – she was no better, but no worse. And yes, Nicki was feeling quite well, thank you. And so were the rest of the girls. Everyone was just great. Absolutely everyone.
Well, everyone didn't stay great for long. Two days later Garth was sick. Then Nicki. Then Phillip. It went on through his neighborhood, and through their friends, and through friends of their friends. One by one the Piper Flu picked off Zee's friends, his casual acquaintances, even people he didn't like.
When Zee heard about Garth's illness – then Nicki's, then Phillip's -he wasn't even surprised. He was horrified, yes, panicked, yes, but not surprised. He had known it would come.
He wasn't uneasy anymore. The creature in his stomach had transformed itself into something much more powerful than unease. Now he was filled with fear and dread, and some kind of strange apprehension. There was something wrong, something really wrong, and it was something strange, something unnatural-and it was something to do with him.
But what?
There was no answer, just dread. He could barely eat or sleep. Every time the phone rang, he jumped out of his skin, sure that on the other end would be news of someone else who had fallen ill. His parents, who had at the first appearance of the Piper Flu in London begun to talk of sending Zee to America, spent their time whispering and watching.