Kim and Josh had been married for eleven years. She was South Korean — sharp-eyed, quiet, and warm in the way that only people who have known real hardship can be.
Josh was European, broad-shouldered, practical, and the kind of man who fixed things before you noticed they were broken.
They were middle class in the truest sense: not struggling, not comfortable enough to stop worrying. They lived on Parkinson Street, in a neighbourhood that had once been full of noise — children on bicycles, arguments through thin walls, the smell of cooking drifting from open windows. Now most of those windows were sealed. Most of those neighbours were gone.
Kim was infected.
Josh hadn't told anyone. Not the authorities. Not the block warden. Not even Kim's mother, who called every Sunday and had stopped asking why Kim never came to the phone.
He knew what happened to the infected when they were reported — the rehab centres weren't rehabilitation at all.
They were containment. No cure existed. The virus had no mercy and neither did the system built to manage it. So Josh kept Kim in the back bedroom, quarantined behind a locked door and his own desperate love.
he told himself every morning that he was buying time. He had not yet admitted to himself that time was the one thing they had already run out of.
Their two children — Yaru, eight years old, with his father's stubborn jaw, and Sherry, six years older with her mother's dark, careful eyes — had been told that Mama was sick with something like the flu. They accepted this the way children accept impossible things: completely, and without asking the questions that would break a parent's heart.
"I'm going to the meds for your pills, okay?" Josh stood at the bedroom door, his forehead resting briefly against the wood. "Be careful. Don't open the door unless I knock four times." — josh said
From the other side came the sound of shifting sheets, and then her voice — still hers, still Kim, even if everything else was slipping.
"Okay, ahh...honey." — "kim said"
Then the cough. Wet and deep, the kind that didn't sound like sickness anymore. It sounded like something tearing.
The lock clicked into place.
The door rattled once in its frame as Josh tested it from the outside — a habit now, checking, always checking — and then his footsteps receded down the hallway. The sound of the front door. The car engine turning over. Silence.
Josh drove with both hands on the wheel, his jaw tight, eyes fixed on the grey strip of road ahead. The medical shop was four blocks away. He had made this drive six times in the past two weeks.
He knew every pothole, every broken traffic light blinking amber in the middle of the day, every boarded shopfront with its hastily painted red cross meaning do not enter, someone here is already lost.
He was passing the old park — the one where Yaru had learned to ride a bike last summer, the one that now sat empty and overgrown — when he felt it before he saw it.
A vibration. Low. Bone-deep. The kind that doesn't come from the road.
HE HIT THE BRAKES.....!
Above him, cutting through the pale sky in tight, purposeful formation, were fighter jets. Six, then eight, then more — military aircraft moving fast and low, their shadows flickering across the rooftops like a warning nobody had bothered to put into words. Behind them, heavier. Transport planes. The dull, grey bulk of things built not for speed but for cargo. For numbers.
Josh sat with the engine idling and his window half down, staring upward through the windshield.
"What the..." he breathed.
The jets did not circle. They did not slow. They crossed the sky and disappeared beyond the eastern skyline, leaving only the fading thunder of their engines and a silence that felt, somehow, louder than the noise had been.
Josh sat for a moment longer than he should have. Then he put the car back into gear.
The pills, he told himself. Get the pills. Go home.
Back on Parkinson Street, behind the locked door of the back bedroom, Kim was getting worse.
She lay against the headboard with her knees drawn up, a cloth pressed to her mouth that she no longer bothered to hide from herself. The blood had been coming since morning — not a lot at first, just a faint copper taste, something she could explain away.
Now it was more. The cloth was dark with it. Her eyes moved too fast, jumping between objects in the room with a restless, involuntary energy, as though her body had stopped obeying her in small ways before it would stop in the larger ones. The dark circles beneath her eyes had deepened into something almost bruise-like, sunken and permanent-looking, the skin beneath them tissue-thin.
She thought about Yaru. She thought about Sherry. She pressed the cloth harder against her mouth and breathed through her nose and thought about nothing else.
After a while, the cramps came, low and insistent, and she understood she needed the bathroom.
She moved slowly, carefully, the way she had learned to move — conserving what was left.
The bathroom was four steps from the bed. She counted them. She sat. She let the ordinary, indignant business of being a body with needs continue, because it was still continuing, and that meant something, even now.
She was reaching for the tissue when she heard it.
From somewhere outside — down the street, or perhaps closer, perhaps next door — a scream tore open the quiet afternoon like a blade through fabric.
"AAAAAAAAAA—!"
Not a child's cry. Not a television. A human voice, adult and raw and absolutely certain of its own terror, cut off not by distance but by something else entirely.
Kim went still.
Her hand hovered in the air. Her heart — still working, still hers — slammed once, twice, against her ribs.
Then she was moving. Not carefully anymore. Not conserving anything. She was on her feet and crossing the bedroom and her hand was on the door handle and the lock was clicking back and the door was swinging open before she had consciously made the decision to do any of it,
because the sound she had heard was the kind of sound that dismantles decisions.
She stepped into the hallway.
The door swung open
And Kim's legs simply gave way
Her knees hit the floor the way heavy things fall
She was crying desperately while screaming...
"Noooo..Nooo...No..."