What Blooms from Dust by James Markert

Author:James Markert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

No one spoke in the Goodbye household. Coughing and hacking were the only sounds of the day.

Ellen had started a croupy cough of her own that rivaled her son’s. In her mind she’d begun to count the days she had left—she felt certain now the dust would eventually kill them all.

Hurry up, then, and get it over with.

She sat at the dining room table by herself. Josiah and Wilmington were in the kitchen, sitting across from each other but not talking. Just staring.

James hadn’t slept at all the night before, which meant that Ellen hadn’t slept either, and her eyelids grew heavier by the minute. James had finally cried himself to sleep ten minutes ago. Ellen was fighting it, afraid that if she nodded off now she wouldn’t sleep during the night, and last night had been horrible. All that crying and coughing had sent her mind wandering to places it only went when hope was gone.

She and Orion had been the only ones in town still clinging to it. Josiah had lost it weeks ago. Wilmington’s hope had begun to dwindle the day Jeremiah was taken away. But that big duster, the one that occurred on the day they now called Black Sunday, had buried any hope that remained. The hole was too dark and deep now, and there were no more rungs on that ladder. “No use climbing anymore,” she said aloud.

Black Sunday had ruined them, entering their brains like a disease, mean and ugly. The things they’d all said to each other made her sick to her stomach, and it wasn’t just those who’d gathered in the Bentley or who lived in Nowhere. Rumor said it was widespread. Folks were acting strange in Guymon to the southwest, and also up north in Liberal, just across the Kansas border. That Black Sunday dust had combed across the plains, churning like the fancy end of a tractor, tilling up dust and slamming it down with a force never seen before, leaving nothing but brain-dead survivors in its wake.

Just about everybody had lost their filters and turned mean and ugly, speaking their minds without any thought of the repercussions. And now everyone had gone quiet, weighed down by all that dust, and no one seemed to have the energy to try anymore.

No one, that is, except Jeremiah and that boy, Peter, the smiler who never said boo. A boy she loved like her own but had only recently met. Come to think of it, Nicholas Draper still managed a smile. Probably had something to do with how Jeremiah had covered him up during all that darkness. That ugly dust had never got to him, and somehow it had never touched Jeremiah. He’d probably spent so many nights under the weight of those nightmares that it had made him somehow immune.

Or maybe it was the five seconds he’d spent in that electric chair.

Yesterday evening she’d gone over to the Bentley to check on Orion. Nicholas Draper had been outside clearing his porch.

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