Read Rise & Walk (Book 2): Pathogen for Free Online Page B

terrible arthritic tightness of her hands as she gripped the dusty fabric of her family room curtains.  Pulling the frilled cloth aside just enough for her to peer out with one eye, she saw only a dark blur.  Her eyes were not what they had once been.  Most evenings when she would look outside of her window she would only see orange blooms reflected underneath each streetlight, blurry and indecipherable.  Now with the power outage, she saw nothing but the infinite darkness of night.  She had noticed a loss in her ability to recognize detail at a distance ever since her seventieth birthday.  For a decade now her vision had grown worse with each passing year.  She now noticed distant objects only by their movement.  If something shifted, a blurry form shimmered or slipped one way or another, she knew that there was a good chance that something was there.  Margaret was thankful that she could still recognize things close up in good light.  As she carefully looked out through the thick pane, she felt anger that her age and a power failure had rendered her so blind.
    Her small house had been silent since sunset, now that the gunshots outside seemed to have settled down.  Over the past two days, there had been such a clamor outside.  Cars raced past her home with residents seeking to escape.  The chaos that dominated the television was also outside her door. Desperate for some assistance, for someone to take her with them, she had ventured outside in the daytime to try and catch some kind soul’s attention.   Margaret found it very frightening to leave the safety of her home because she had trouble moving very fast, even if it was only to the end of her driveway.  A lone vehicle, a neighbor that she couldn’t recognize at a distance, slowed down for a moment, stopped, and then sped off without acknowledgement.  She felt exposed and horribly vulnerable as she waved in vain for help.  How could a person just ignore her like that?  As her view of the retreating vehicle blurred out of sight, she sank into a deep sadness at the thought that no one cared to help her.  A gunshot in the distance shocked her and spurred her to return to her empty home.
    Since the loss of her husband Al, just three months prior, Margaret had suffered a crushing loneliness.  Yet she was no stranger to loss.  Her son had died almost sixteen years earlier; a casualty of the first Gulf War.  Her boy’s death was a difficult time for Margaret and her husband.  So much so that Al continued on at the Richardson Plant for five years past the age of retirement.  Making bullets for soldiers became a constructive if not vengeful output for his anger.  He said that each round he packed could save one of our boys by killing one of theirs.  Al dealt with his loss by loading ammunition without realizing that he was also abandoning Margaret to her grief each day.  Not willing to burden her husband in a time when she needed his love most, she stayed quiet about her feelings.  She often wished that they had spent those years consoling each other instead of mourning separately. Now that he was gone, she regretted every moment that she could have spent with her dear husband.  When he succumbed to heart failure she was devastated and more over, she was very alone.
    No one would be coming to her aid.  She had no one left to care for her, and no one remembered her.  The people from the church hadn’t sent anyone by since Sunday morning to bring her a meal as they had done since Al passed away.  After waiting two hours past her dinner time, she fed herself a can of chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers.  Her arthritis made opening the can an ordeal as her hands persisted in slipping off the thin metal lever of the opener.  Since losing her husband and with him his social security benefits, she had scrimped and scraped out a meager existence and was lucky to have the soup on her shelf.  The television had fallen into disuse and no longer