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looked extremely
upset; some looked stunned.
    “Jubal,” Red said, wincing.
    Jubal sighed. “What is it?”
    “One of this lady’s pimples popped all over
my rubber glove.”
    “Christ, hold on while I open the back door
and lay the blankets out, then you guys can set her in the
cruiser.”
    With looks of disgust on their faces, the two
men hurriedly positioned the woman in the back seat so that she sat
straight up. Then Red and Taylor backed way—fast, holding their
hands away from their bodies.
    After being released, the woman toppled over
onto the seat.
    “Okay, you two sissies. Go ahead and take a
breath now.”
    “Are we finished here, Jubal?” Taylor whined.
“My wife is waiting for me at home, and I’d sure like to get these
contaminated gloves off.”
    “Yeah, you two get out of here.”
    They both walked off at a brisk pace yet
slowly enough so it didn’t appear they were running away.
    Jubal slammed the back door of the cruiser as
Fiona came out of the Rite-Aid.
    “All closed up?”
    “Yes,” she said, jingling her keys in the
front door lock. “Meet me back at my place?”
    “See you there.”
    Jubal got into his cruiser and took off
toward Fiona’s house—soon to be his own, too, after the wedding.
She lived in a small tangle of a neighborhood on the south side of
Serenity. Many of the town’s older citizens lived there, too—Pops
Perez for example—and Fiona liked to visit and help them when they
needed it. They all loved Fiona and were always cooking dinners for
her—and Jubal, too, when he was visiting.
    Jubal wrinkled his nose. What in God’s name
was that smell—like something had died? It had to be the woman in
the back seat. Maybe, in her delirious state, she’d shit herself.
Jubal hoped she hadn’t gotten any on the seat, then chastised
himself for being so selfish.
    The woman moaned as if to let Jubal know she
was still kicking.
    Man, he’d smelled better aromas on road-kill
duty, which he had to perform on the town’s back roads.
    Jubal rolled down the windows of the car. Too
bad if it was two hundred degrees outside; he couldn’t stand
much more of that god-awful smell.
    Then the woman’s words came back to haunt
him...
    Dead army.
    He couldn’t get that phrase out of his head
no matter how hard he tried; it worried his thoughts like a dog at
a tasty bone. Maybe he was wrong, but he could have sworn that’s
what the woman had said back there at the car wash: dead army. He
wondered again what she had meant. Had she seen US soldiers die of
this strange sickness, or from some other type of terrible
accident? God, he hoped not.
    And then there was the drunken ambulance
dispatcher, who had told him everyone for hundreds of miles around
was a victim of the sickness, too.
    It was a goddamn epidemic.
    Jubal wiped sweat from his brow with his
stained shirtsleeve.
    As the deputy drove his car through town
toward his fiancée’s, the blazing sun began to descend along its
arc.
    He wondered what color the sunset would be
this evening.
    Much later, back at his mother’s house, Jubal
slowly swung the front door open, stepped inside and closed it.
    His mother snored on the couch in the same
spot he’d left her earlier this afternoon. The Navajo comforter was
still pulled up to her neck.
    He wanted to turn on the wall-TV and flip
channels to see if there were any updates on the situation, but the
remote control was gripped tightly in his mother’s hand, and he did
not want to wake her. He would have to use the TV on his bedroom
computer.
    The room dimmed as night fell.
    He stretched, lifting his arms; his back
popped. He rotated his head on his stiff neck. For a man of 22
years, he felt three times as old; the day’s events had taken a lot
out of him, with his trip to Fiona’s being the last straw. He’d had
to carry that sick woman all by himself into his fiancée’s house,
exploding boils, road-kill stench and all.
    He still wished Fiona hadn’t asked for the
woman to