Read The Dead And The Gone for Free Online

days, Alex reminded himself, and three days was nothing when the world was in chaos and communication was impossible.
    They had plenty of food. They had a home. They had the church. They had each other. They had Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Lorraine. If it came to it, they had Carlos. They were better off than millions of people. And it wasn’t as though they didn’t have Papi and Mami. They just didn’t know how they were.
    It would be all right. It had to be.
    Still, before he let his sisters go to Mass, he wanted to know as much as he could about what was going on, at least in their neighborhood. So he decided to take a walk.
    “Where are you going?” Bri asked with that tinge of fear he’d come to expect in her voice.
    “Just for a walk,” Alex said.
    “Can we come with you?” Julie asked.
    “No,” Alex said.
    “Why not?” Julie demanded. “I’m bored. There’s nothing to do here. Why can’t we go on a walk with you?”
    [_Because I’m trying to protect you! _] Alex wanted to yell, but he knew that would only scare Bri.
    “You’ll be going to church tomorrow,” he said instead. “Have either of you done any homework since Wednesday?”
    They shook their heads.
    “I expect to see it completely done by the time I get home,” Alex said, the way Mami would have. “And I tell you what. If I find anything is open, a store or a coffee shop, we’ll go as soon as 1 get back. All right?”
    “You won’t be gone long?” Bri asked.
    “Not long,” Alex said. “I promise. Now start your homework.”
    “Come on, Julie,” Bri said. “I’ll help you with your math.”
    “I don’t need any help,” Julie grumbled, but she followed her older sister to their bedroom. Alex breathed a sigh of relief. He couldn’t blame his sisters for wanting to get out. But they had to be protected.
    He knew he needed to check the bulletin board at St. Margaret’s, if for no other reason than to see if there was a notice about the schools reopening. But instead of walking east to the church, he went west.
    Alex told himself as he walked toward Riverside Drive that the Hudson River would be fine, but even so, when he got to the river, he felt a sense of relief. The river was agitated, but that could have been from the heavy rains on Thursday. New Jersey, across the river, was right where it belonged. If rivers had tides, and Alex had to admit he didn’t know if they did, they didn’t seem too bad.
    Alex turned around and began the walk to St. Margaret’s. There was hardly any traffic compared to the days before, and there weren’t many people on the streets, but there was plenty of noise coming from the apartment buildings. Alex grinned. Usually when the weather was this hot, people had their air conditioners going, but with no electricity, windows were open instead. He heard quarrels, laughter, scoldings, even lovemaking, many of the same sounds he’d heard in Uncle Jimmy’s neighborhood, only now in English instead of Spanish.
    But for all the sounds of life on Eighty-eighth Street, Broadway felt dead. Nothing seemed to be open, not the supermarket, or the coffee shop, or the deli, or the Korean grocery, or the dry cleaner, or the Laundromat, or the liquor store, or the florist, or the Chinese takeout, or the movie theater. He saw a couple of cops but very few other people walking around. Even the fire engines and ambulances seemed to have stopped their downtown runs.
    At least St. Margaret’s had people in it. The bulletin board was surrounded, and it took Alex a couple of minutes before he could see everything that had been posted.
    There were so many sheets that the walls around the bulletin board had been drafted into service as well. The first thing he noticed was a listing of the dead. There weren’t really that many names on it: two sheets, single spaced, three columns across, alphabetical order.
    Alex forced himself to look at the Ms. Nobody named Morales. His knees buckled with relief. As long as Mami wasn’t