A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer Page B

scanned the titles until I recognized one.
    The sweet, sickly smell of death clung to my hair and I twisted it in a tight French braid. Next beauty salon we passed I was finding clippers and shearing it off.
    “I grabbed a book for you.” I handed the book to Rabbit as I brought the last of the stuff to the Jeep.
    “What is it?” Rab flipped through it.
    “
The Swiss Family Robinson
. Dad used to read it to me when I was little.” There were times when I felt guilty about knowing Dad before the wars started. Rabbit’s whole life Dad was coming and going into combat, into places I knew never made it on the news because Mom watched it religiously until hedied. As if she might get a sense of when he might come back, or where he was, based on news reports. Thing was, Dad said so many times that he was nowhere near the places we heard about on the news—those were missions for other marines. His marines—the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force, or CBIRF—never made the news, and that was the way they liked it. I didn’t really understand then.
I know better now
. “The family survive a shipwreck and build a tree house.”
    “Thanks, Nadia.” Rabbit hugged it to his chest like I’d given him something more valuable than a story. Maybe it felt like a piece of Dad to him, too. “I think we should keep moving.”
    “Okay.” We finished loading the Jeep and lifted Twawki inside. His paws were swollen and so hot to the touch it was like a horrible sunburn radiating out.
    “He’s getting worse.” Rabbit toed the dirt.
    “There were a few pills upstairs. Antibiotics for a human.”
    “Can we give him those?”
    “I think we have to try and then find a veterinarian clinic at the next town. See if there aren’t more pills, or books, or something on what to do.”
    “He’s gonna die if we don’t, right?” Rabbit kissed Twawki’s nose.
    “I think he might.” My voice dipped to a whisper.
    “Then let’s do it. We gotta try.”
    I mushed a couple of the pills—the right dosage for Mr. Richard Bjorn, according to the bottle’s label—into a vending-machine peanut butter cookie and got the dog to swallow them.
    Hours down the road, Rabbit checked on our patient for the three hundredth time. “Twawki looks better.” Rabbittwisted around in his seat. Two doses of meds and we were looking at the bottom of an empty bottle.
    The dog thumped his tail as if to answer.
    “He needs more than we gave him. Mom always said we had to take all the antibiotics or they’d stop working.”
    “Yeah, a full course of meds. She knew what she was doing.” Her work as a nurse wasn’t lost on me. And she couldn’t have taken the shot in the beginning? Still be here with us to help? “We need to go into the next town.”
    “What if there are people there?”
    “We have the gun out now,” I assured him, and myself.
    “I can shoot it too. Bean gave those video games and fake guns to both of us. I practiced a lot in my room.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, I didn’t hardly play anything else once it started.”
    Dad had guns in the house. He taught us how to handle them, how to clean them, how to check to make sure they were unloaded. Mom kept a handgun by her bed whenever Dad was deployed. But promises of shooting ranges and lessons disappeared in the smoke of grief that suffocated our family.
    “Me too. I played one late at night.” When I should have been doing homework or chores or sleeping. I was beginning to think I should have had real conversations with Rab a lot sooner. Maybe things would have been different at home if I’d bothered to listen to his answers and ask questions.
    The gas light popped on the screen. “We’re low on gas.”
    Rabbit glanced down at the map in his lap. “There’s a train station five miles ahead. There might be a parking lot with cars.”
    “Is it in a town?”
    “Outskirts. Like a suburb thingy.”
    “Let’s check.”
    The flocks of birds were our first clue.
    “What are