John thought he was having a heart attack, but his building wasn't far from one of the urgent care centers, so when he contacted them and they asked if he could make it in on his own, he said yes.
He didn't drive of course, because he'd read somewhere that an astonishingly large percentage of fatal auto accidents were caused by drivers having heart attacks. Halfway to the center he wondered if he'd lied, and he wasn't going to make it after all. He entered the emergency line number in his phone, but didn't dial it yet.
He regretted eating so many cheeseburgers because they were cheap, fast, and easy when he was tired. He regretted not getting more exercise on a regular basis, although he'd already regretted that when lugging endless sacks of groceries. He regretted that ambulance rides were being limited.
By the time he staggered through the doors, he felt like he'd walked a hundred miles instead of a few blocks. To his shock, they were waiting for him with a stretcher, he barely gasped his name before they were lifting him onto it. He'd come in once a few years ago with a friend who'd been dripping blood everywhere, and they'd had to wait for hours. But now, when medical centers everywhere were supposed to be overloaded, they were meeting him at the door.
It wasn't a heart attack, or rather, it was, but it wasn't caused by a clogged artery. The symptoms and the damage were the same, but the cause was different. He had caught the virus.
It was weird, but after a brief burst of indignation, he found that he didn't really regret having been the one who put himself at risk. Better him than one of the kids who lived in his building. He just hoped that he hadn't passed it on to them too.
Doubts assailed him. Had he been careful enough? Had he remembered to wash his hands every time? Had he spread it to others?
He expected to be sent to the hospital, after they told him that it was also in his lungs. But to his shock, they sent him home, with a few medicines and a plastic tool to measure the strength of his breath, and insisted that he didn't need to return until he couldn't move it to the assigned mark. That really drove home how severely overloaded the hospitals were.
He notified everyone in his building through the chat they'd set up. The responses were mixed. Some were horrified and accusatory. Some were fearful. Others were sympathetic. Only a couple of people thanked him again for all of the deliveries, but he could understand why most of them were more afraid that he'd brought the virus to them.
John was so tired when he crawled into his bed that he wondered if he'd ever wake up again.
When he woke up, he panicked because he felt like he was drowning. After a moment he realized that the sound that had woken him had been his doorbell. It was about thirty miles from his bed to his door, but he made it. He leaned against the door and squinted through the tiny peephole that he had never used since moving in.
He didn't see anyone or anything. He waited for half of eternity, or at least a couple of minutes, but nothing moved in the warped circle of corridor. He opened the door and stared at the eclectic pile of food containers piled up like a short wall against the bottom edge.
For a moment he forgot that he had the virus, as he considered them with suspicion, but then he remembered. It didn't matter if they were contaminated, as long as they didn't contain ordinary types of potential food poisoning, because he already had what everyone was afraid of catching.
There were a lot of them. More than he could eat in a day even if he were healthy. He blinked back tears. He was overwhelmed in more ways than one. Picking up the dishes and carrying them to his small kitchen felt like a herculean task.
He was halfway through when he looked up to see old Mrs. Beaglesworth, of the many potato orders, striding toward him with another container. He tried to make a polite but sincere protest from a distance, glad to see that she was at least wearing a mask and gloves. She ignored him.
"Nonsense. You should be in a hospital, not trying to tend to things yourself. Leave that and let's get you back into bed young man," she said authoritatively.
"What if you catch it?" he protested as she took the containers he held.
"I'm already old," she pointed out as she pushed past him.
"That means you're in a higher risk group," he replied worriedly.
She ignored him, and the rest of the containers. After she deposited her armload on the counter, she came back and took his elbow in a surprisingly firm grip. "Bed or bathroom first?" she asked.
He felt too tired to argue.
A few hours later after he'd slept and woken up again he asked, "Were you a nurse?"
She laughed, and replied "Nope. But my mister and I spent enough time in and out of hospitals over the years that I picked up a lot."
She had not only stored all the food away, she had brought in a humidifier from somewhere, set out his next doses of medicines, and dragged the rocking chair he hardly ever used into his bedroom so that she could sit comfortably beside his bed. She took his temperature and his pulse with professional ease, and held the breath analyzer up for him to use, just like he'd been instructed to.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
She also treated him as though he were 14 instead of 40, but he couldn't really work up the energy to complain. He did sit up and protest when she brought in the oxygen tank. He wasn't sure how much time had passed, days maybe.
"She wanted you to have it," Mrs. Beaglesworth insisted. I made sure that she'd already received her new tank. This one's only got about a quarter left, but it will help."
"Oxygen is supposed to be dangerous if you don't need it," he protested.
"You need it," she said a bit sharply. "Did you know that we all die of suffocation? Well, unless you get your brain smashed to bits faster than it can die of oxygen deprivation. But everything else, heart attacks, pneumonia, strokes, even simple blood loss. It's all just keeping enough oxygen from reaching your brain."
"I'm not arguing that," he said plaintively. "But I'm pretty sure that it shouldn't be used without a doctor's order."
She rolled her eyes at him, and sighed. "You live by rules don't you kid? After you recover, why don't you try breaking a few more often."
She helped him contact the urgent care center and ask, and then he apologized after they received his breath analyzer readings, and agreed with her.
"I'm sorry," he said again.
"Tsk, nevermind that. You just lack experience, that's all," she insisted cheerfully.
"I wish I'd taken more vacations before. I don't think people are going to be able to travel as much for a long time," he confided.
She laid a cool gloved hand against his forehead and looked at him with concern as she replied confidently, "There's no rush, the world's not going anywhere even if it takes a long time. You can still travel more."
"Experience," he explained.
She blinked at him and then laughed. "Experience comes to you wherever you are. All you have to do is live through it."
--
Anne woke up and wondered if she were dying. Then she wondered if she even wanted to live. Then she saw the waves and remembered that she'd seen a dragon's eyes, and that she really wasn't crazy no matter how many people had insisted that she must be.
Amaru opened the door to her room without knocking and demanded, "Where is the child?"
She gazed at the golden sea without feeling like she was going to throw up, but still without being able to make out what Chris had told her was his human form. "Child?" she asked blankly.
"I suppose that to your kind he would be an elder," the dragon conceded. "Chris, as he calls himself in your tongue."
"He's a child to you?" Anne asked doubtfully. "I think calling him an elder is too extreme, he looks like he's only a little older than I am."
Amaru laughed, and Anne wanted him to keep laughing forever. She could feel his amusement in the waves that surrounded her, and for a moment it washed away all of her physical discomfort.
"He is but a handful of centuries old, while I am much older than your kind," the dragon explained.
She was torn between asking if he meant that seriously, and asking if that was why their speech sounded so old fashioned. But as the laughter faded from the waves of what she had thought was intangible water, but the dragon called life, more pressing concerns presented themselves.
She slid over the edge of the bed and almost fell, before asking uncertainly, "Sorry, but can you help me walk to the restroom?"
There was a long silence. She pushed herself upright and reached for the stand beside her, which wobbled a little. A moment later a grip that nearly broke her arm took hold of her. She couldn't see anything but flashes of golden light and movement, but the painful grip guided her in the right direction, so she stumbled along beside it.
She realized they'd reached her destination when she heard the thump of porcelain on porcelain, and the dragon beside her said disapprovingly, "Wastes should not be dumped into the waterways, even though it seems very convenient from within your dwelling."
"It doesn't go into waterways," she protested weakly. "I mean, I guess it used to, but every city has to have a treatment plant now, where everything gets sterilized and filtered."
"Oh?" he asked with interest. "Tell me about this plant, I have never seen such a thing growing in the wild."
Anne opened her mouth, and then shook her head. "I'll try to explain, after I'm finished in here. If you could step out?" she hinted strongly.
The sea rippled with movement, but she heard the sound of water running in the sink instead.
"I can't see anything while you're this close," she complained.
"Oh, I see," he said without apologizing, but the sea retreated.
When Anne could make out the outline of the doorway she leaned on the counter and closed it before moving back to the toilet. The waves that radiated off of him were still visible, and it made her wonder if he could see through walls. Maybe the closed door didn't affect him.
After a moment she gritted her teeth and told herself that in that case, clothes didn't matter either, and he'd already seen everything. It was not really a comforting thought. She remembered his claim about being older than humanity, and told herself that a dinosaur wouldn't care if it saw a monkey pee.
Even though she'd needed to go quite urgently, it took her awhile.
Her arm ached too.
When she edged through the door a bit later, the sea appeared to be sitting on the couch. Not that she could really see the couch, but she remembered where it was.
Her other arm ached with equal intensity by the time the dragon kindly helped her back to the bed. And he didn't even wait until she was settled before he demanded to hear about the strange plant that could sterilize wastes. He deemed her explanation both insufficient and rather disgusting after she told him that it wasn't actually a plant, but an artificial lake of collected sewage, and realized that she didn't know exactly what happened after that. It was hard to argue.
"If you'll move back into the other room, I can look it up on the tablet Chris lent me," she suggested.
"Such a thing is written on a tablet at your bedside?" Amaru asked doubtfully.
"Yeah, I mean, you can look up almost anything on the internet," she agreed, but the words threw her into a coughing fit.
"This is not a good place to gather enough energy to fight the unweavers with just the defenses of your blood," Amaru commented.
She did feel very weak, so she ignored the strange word and asked, "Where is a good place?"
"Find this tablet that speaks of treatments for wastes, and then I shall take you to the nearest natural pool," the dragon declared, and moved back far enough for her to make out the wavering form of the iPad.