Page 43 of What Remains

Outside, the wind rattled broken signs beneath a sky rolling with gray. Inside the SUV, the silence settled again. This time, it wasn't an absence. It was a space they were both choosing to share.

Josie watched the landscape blur past the window. The miles crawled by. She tried counting fence posts, tracking clouds, studying how the afternoon light fractured through cracked glass. Anything to keep her mind anchored in the present.

But the present had a way of slipping through her fingers.

Her breath fogged the glass. Layla snored softly in the backseat. Seth kept his eyes on the road, unreadable.

And inside Josie's chest, something old and bruised ached.

Not now... please, not now.

She blinked hard, forcing herself to focus on the grind of the engine, the vibration under her feet, the distant thump of the trailer bouncing over potholes. She lifted her hand to rub her temple⁠—

—and the motion alone triggered it.

A smell rose from memory, sudden and vivid.

Disinfectant.

Burnt plastic.

Iron-heavy blood hanging in the air.

Six years in the Air Force, then the civilian trauma unit—she'd seen ugly things, treated wounds that should have ended lives, held composure through chaos that broke stronger people. But nothing had prepared her for that day.

No. Don't go there. Don't⁠—

But the road droned on, a hypnotic vibration that weighted her eyelids. The warmth of the vehicle wrapped around her, a dangerous comfort that coaxed her under despite every instinct screaming to stay awake. Her vision blurred, her head lolling back against the seat as the present dissolved into the drone of the road...

The last time she'd felt this tired, she was pulling into her own driveway, sirens wailing somewhere in the distance...

She pulled into the driveway just as the fifth police cruiser in two miles tore past, sirens wailing into the distance as if something were chasing them. Josie's hands trembled on the steering wheel. She'd never seen this much emergency response outside a natural disaster—yet the sky remained calm, the neighborhood still.

Too still.

She forced herself to focus, lowering the garage door before helping Layla out of her booster seat. The moment they stepped into the mudroom, instinct pricked along her skin. The house didn't sound right—no TV, no footsteps upstairs, no clatter from the kitchen.

"Mark?" she called, loud enough to carry.

No answer. Just silence, thick and unnatural.

Fear ran down her spine.

She took Layla's coat off and forced a smile which she didn't come close to meaning. "Let's get you downstairs, sweetheart. I've got a surprise for you."

It wasn't a surprise—it was safety. The basement had no windows. She flipped on a cartoon and settled Layla on the couch with her stuffed rabbit.

"Mommy will be right back. You stay here, okay? No matter what."

Layla nodded, already absorbed in the screen.

Josie sprinted upstairs, grabbing her medical mask from her bag and tying a scarf over it for good measure. She refused to take chances. Whatever this sickness turned out to be, the ER staff had been overwhelmed, terrified—and they'd warned her in no uncertain terms:

Don't come in. Don't expose yourself. Get home and stay home.

She reached the top of the stairs—and froze.

Coughing. Wet. The kind that spoke of real damage, of lungs tearing themselves apart. Not Mark's normal cough.