Part 5 — The Scratch
You smell like rain on warm pavement. When you go far, my chest makes a small thunder. I look for your footsteps the way I look for water.
The banner—LOVE ISN’T A CRIME— sagged under new snow like it was already tired of making sense. Cars lined the curb in mismatched colors; ring lights wobbled on tripods like bright, nervous jellyfish. Inside, the baby monitor pulsed with Buddy’s breath, a quiet metronome telling us we still had something to count.
Mom set a box of supplies on the island: disposable bowls, a portable fence, a baby monitor twin, bottled water, nitrile gloves. Kira hovered by the doorway, stripped of halo and branding, looking like any neighbor who’d stayed too long and didn’t know how to leave. “I borrowed from three different shelters,” she said. “I’ll return or replace everything. Don’t argue.”
“Thank you,” Mom said, and meant it all the way down.
I reached for the fence panels and felt a sting—small, sharp, insistent. A red line near my wrist I hadn’t seen before, no longer than a thumbnail, no deeper than an accident can be. It could have been the latch on the storm door. It could have been the rough edge of the cellar step. It could have been anything.
It could have been everything.
“Jade?” Mom’s voice found me by the sink. Her eyes tracked the way my jaw clenched before I admitted it. “Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” I lied reflexively.
She didn’t argue. She leaned in and turned my wrist under the light with the kind of tenderness that has procedures attached. The scratch flashed an angry pink.
“When?” she asked, for the record in her head.
“The cellar,” I said. “Maybe. Or the hook by the pantry earlier. I didn’t even feel it until—”
“Did anything… land there?” she asked, not looking at my face, which was kind.
There was a memory of warmth. A single drop. The way it had felt like a secret. “Maybe,” I whispered.
Dad went still. The room went still around him. Outside, a car horn chirped by accident, an apology shaped like a beep.
“Okay,” Mom said, already moving. She pulled a small kit from the supply box—gauze, antiseptic, a tiny vial that made my throat jump. “We’re going to clean it, document it, and draw a small sample.” She caught my eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you more than I have to.”
“You won’t,” I said, and meant it like a pledge to be braver than I felt.
Agent Ramirez watched from the doorway, not intruding, not leaving. “I’ll alert the lab,” she said. “Fast channel.”
Dr. Lin stepped closer to the screen door, as if proximity could be support. “We’ll prioritize,” he promised. He looked like a man who had promised too much all week and was still putting more vows on the pile.
Dad gripped the back of a chair until his knuckles went white. “We should’ve put the government out on the curb with the trash,” he said, and then flinched at himself. “I don’t mean it. I just—”
“I know what you mean,” Mom said.
She swabbed. She taped. She drew just enough to make the vial a story worth telling. Her hands didn’t shake. Mine did. When she finished, she kissed the air near my temple, not touching skin, loving out loud.
I thought about Hannah, purple-star hat, fever eyes. I thought about Mr. Whitaker, ambulance doors closing like a book you hadn’t finished yet. The street had filled with opinions because no one knew what to do with their fear. I was nineteen minutes into learning how to hold mine without dropping it on anyone’s foot.
The front door opened onto a sound that changed the shape of the air: a low, polite rumble. Two bikes idled at the curb, black metal quiet as prayer. The men who swung off them weren’t the kind you hired to look pretty; they were the kind you called when you needed a couch moved up too-small stairs. The patch on their jackets read Guardian Riders in curved letters that looked like they’d survived rain.
The shorter rider lifted his chin in greeting toward Ramirez, not challenging, just existing. He stayed on the sidewalk like a law he respected. “We run animal escorts,” he said to the street, to no one. “Cancer kids, shelter pulls, disaster evac. Heard this address needed options, not trouble.”
“Options are dangerous if they’re reckless,” Ramirez said, not reaching for her radio, which felt like trust.
“Never reckless,” the rider said. “We put our bodies between bad and the people we love. That’s the job.”
Dad stepped onto the porch like a tide coming in. Something in his shoulders loosened just seeing the bikes, the way people relax at the smell of their hometown diner. He didn’t say brother or veteran or tribe, but it was all there in the nod. “We’re not running,” he said. “Not unless the road is the safest place.”
“Copy that,” the taller rider said. “We’ll be near.”
The baby monitor popped and clicked. I looked down the cellar stairs and saw Buddy’s ears come up, tired flagpoles. He shifted to stand, legs shaky but stubborn. He sniffed the bowl, ignored it, and nosed a thing out from under the old workbench: a small, balled lump of blue and orange. Noah’s sock. The one with the dinosaurs.
He carried it like treasure toward the bottom step, laid it carefully, and looked up at me as if to say, I did a thing for the little one. Did I do it right? My throat burned in the good-bad way that means the world hasn’t hardened you completely yet.
“Buddy,” I whispered. “You always do it right.”
Noah appeared, hair a storm, pajamas twisted, cheeks creased by sleep. He stopped at the top stair because rules were stories we were telling with our bodies now. “Is he sad?” he asked.
“He’s listening,” I said. “He needs your voice.”
Noah crouched, small hands gripping the rail like it was a ship. “Hi, Buddy,” he said, lisping the B the way he always had. “I can’t come down but I’m right here. I’m wearing the other sock.” He stuck out one foot. Two T-rexes danced. Buddy’s tail thumped once, then again, slow applause.
The house exhaled. Even the street noise softened for a beat, as if a thousand strangers also needed to see one small boy show a dog his sock.
The moment lasted exactly long enough to be a memory before the doorbell stabbed it. Agent Ramirez answered; the courier held out a box the size of a book with a label I couldn’t read from the stairs. She signed, read, and her face set in the way of a person practicing the sentence they don’t want to say.
“The lab ran the rapid panel,” she said to Mom, to Dad, to us. “The result is… indeterminate for exposure.”
Indeterminate. A non-answer dressed for court.
“What does that even mean?” Dad asked, not angrily, just tired of the alphabet of maybe.
“Not negative,” Dr. Lin said, not sugar-coating. “Not positive.” He looked at me. “It means we don’t know yet.”
Ramirez took a breath like she was diving and added, “Per protocol, with indeterminate exposure in a household under conditional hold, the window shortens.”
“How much?” Mom asked, already bracing.
“From twelve,” Ramirez said gently, “to six.”
The word six sucked color out of the kitchen. It rearranged the furniture. It sat in my chest like a box I couldn’t lift.
“Six hours,” Dad repeated, as if saying it differently might make it turn into a bigger number. “And then what? You kick in the door?”
Ramirez didn’t bluster. “And then we make decisions no one wants to make. I’m trying to avoid that.”
Mom steadied herself on the counter. She didn’t cry. She saved that for other people. “Run the second test,” she said to no one and everyone. “Run them all.”
“We are,” Dr. Lin said. “We will.”
On the sidewalk, a neighbor I didn’t know well—Caleb, the one with a lifted truck and a flag that changed with the season—leaned on the tailgate polishing a long, lean rifle with the casual attention of habit. He wasn’t pointing it. He wasn’t even touching the trigger. But the picture of a man and a gun in a street full of nerves made everything inside me want to crawl out of my skin.
Dad noticed next, the way a lit match notices a dry field. He was out the door before anyone could put a hand on his sleeve.
“Put that away,” he said, voice quiet in the dangerous way.
Caleb didn’t look up. “Second Amendment doesn’t have a curfew, Eli.”
“Neither does decency,” Dad said. “My dog isn’t a burglar.”
“My kids aren’t lab rats,” Caleb shot back, and then, softer, an apology trying to stand up: “I’m scared, man. I’m not pointing it at your house. I’m… practicing not pointing it.”
Agent Ramirez slid between them like a human wedge, hands hip-level and empty. “Let’s give each other the gift of not becoming a headline,” she said. “Please.”
Caleb clicked the safety on—loud for such a small sound—and set the rifle into a case with a nod that meant fine. Dad stared holes into the snow until his breath evened out. The Guardian Riders stayed where they were, engines off, eyes on, a promise without paperwork.
Inside, Mom texted the hospital. Hannah? A moment later: Holding. Running labs. No admission yet. The words steadied me the way handrails do on a moving bus.
I went back to the stairs and read to Buddy from Buddy’s Book—the chapter about the Tomato Garden Massacre—my voice a little dumb, a little brave. He listened like good dogs do: like listening was the job.
Phones buzzed. A new post from the woman in the neighboring county—the one whose video was traveling without brakes—hit a million views. Her dog’s name—Scout—trended beside Buddy’s. The comments grew teeth and halos in equal measure:
@KindlyK: I held my cat at the end. It was the worst loving thing I’ve ever done.
@HardTruths: You’re being played. No one’s dog is safe once they start this.
@FactsMatter: Fluids, not air. Distance + hygiene. Be angry at systems, not each other.
Another DM slipped in from Unknown: a blurry photo of a garage freezer with a padlock and the caption “This is where they said to keep the remains. For the ‘study.’ Don’t say yes.” I closed it like it had hissed at me.
The clock punched its way from noon to one with an indifference I envied. Six hours had become five and a ghost of something like four. Dad paced. Mom made lists. Ramirez negotiated with someone invisible. Dr. Lin drank bad coffee and said nothing for a very long time, which felt like the kindest thing he could do.
In the quiet between text chimes, Buddy made a soft, wet sound that sent every molecule of me toward the cellar door. When I reached the third step, he stood, swayed, and sneezed. A fine red mist freckled the wood. Not a spray. Not dramatic. Just undeniable.
Mom pulled me back with a hand on my shoulder and grief in her bones. “Jade,” she said, because saying my name was the only safe sentence in the room.
Ramirez held very still, as if any motion would break the thin bridge we were crossing. “I need to document,” she said softly, a professional asking to trespass.
I nodded, because the part of me that wanted to throw the world into the trash was busy falling apart.
Buddy, as if he’d read the room, lowered himself gently, placed his chin on the dinosaur sock, and watched me like a lighthouse watches a storm.
On the porch, one of the Guardian Riders checked his phone, then lifted his gaze to Dad. “There’s a private quarantine facility west of here,” he said, voice low. “Quiet. Off-book but legit. We’ve moved cancer kids’ pets there during chemo cycles when families needed time. We can do it clean. Contained. With a vet on call.”
“That’s reckless,” Agent Ramirez said automatically.
“It’s a third road,” the rider said. “Between ‘needle now’ and ‘nothing.’ Sometimes that’s how you keep a family from breaking.”
Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at me. The clock kept not caring.
“We have five hours,” Mom said, like math could be mercy. “Maybe less.”
I didn’t realize I was crying until my voice tripped over it. “If he dies alone in a basement,” I said, “that’s not mercy either.”
No one answered, because there wasn’t an answer yet. There was only a house full of love, a street full of fear, a world full of watchers, and a dog with his chin on a small blue sock, waiting for his people to choose the kind of humans they wanted to be.
Part 6 — The Road of Ice
Your hands smell like the green blanket. When the house moves around me, I wait for your voice to say which way is home.
The offer sat in the kitchen like a third door: a private quarantine facility west of town. Not government. Not a basement. A place where time might stop long enough for the world to catch up.
“That’s reckless,” Agent Ramirez said again, because repetition is how you hold your ground.
“It’s contained,” the shorter Guardian Rider said. “We’ve used it when kids on chemo needed their pets close but safe. Clean intake. Vet on call. Paperwork that won’t get you fired.”
Ramirez looked at Mom like the answer lived in her pocket. Mom looked at me. Dad stared through the window at the banner sagging under snow as if it could spell. The baby monitor ticked Buddy’s breath into the room: present, present, present.
“We cannot sneak him out,” Ramirez said. “If you try, I’ll stop you. If you coordinate—if you let me—maybe I can escort. Under containment. Under rules.”
Dad’s mouth opened with No rules and closed on Yes, but mine.
Mom pulled a clean list from the stack and did what she does best: turned chaos into verbs. “We triple-line a crate. We double-tarp. We put a disposable pad on the floor, we cap the corners, we set a bowl we can seal. No one touches him. I ride in the back with PPE. Jade stays in the front. Eli drives. Dr. Lin follows. Agent Ramirez escorts. If it looks unsafe when we arrive, we turn around.”
“Your clock,” Ramirez said, checking her watch, “is at four hours, thirty-seven minutes.”
“Then we move,” Mom said, voice low and decided.
Kira lifted her chin. “I’ll keep the crowd back,” she said. “No live. Just people.”
It shouldn’t have mattered that she said it like a promise. It did.
We built a path through our own living room. Dad assembled the crate with hands that built cribs and fixed leaky sinks and once tucked a folded flag into a man’s arms. I taped seams. Mom gloved like a ritual, sleeves taped at the wrists, mask fitted, face shield down. In the cellar, Buddy lifted his head at the sound of the metal latch, ears up, ready like always. He didn’t fight the leash when Dad looped it—slow, sure, a new story in an old hand. He nosed the dinosaur sock and then—God help me—picked it up and carried it into the crate himself, laying his chin on it like a pledge.
“Good boy,” I whispered, third step, because that’s as close as the rules allowed. “We’re going for a ride. You love rides.”
He thumped his tail once. The kind of once that makes you reorganize your heart.
When we rolled the crate down the hall on a dolly, the baby monitor stayed with me like a little lighthouse in my palm. On the porch, snow turned everything into a whisper. The Guardian Riders took the flank position without being asked. Agent Ramirez lifted a hand and the crowd actually moved back, a ripple of human water. Kira walked the tape like a border collie in boots, head on a swivel, phone in pocket, for once.
Then someone shouted, “Don’t let them take him!” and the whisper broke.
A kid in a varsity jacket darted under the tape, hands out toward the crate like the right thing resided in his fingers. Dad shifted, blocking without touching. “Stop,” he said. “Please.” It sounded like a border and a prayer.
A uniformed officer stepped in and turned the kid back with a face that said go home alive. Behind him, Caleb—the rifle neighbor—stood empty-handed, jaw clenched, eyes wet. He lifted two palms toward Dad: I’m trying. Dad gave him the smallest nod back: Me too.
Kira planted herself at the end of the walk, palms out, and said to the crowd in a voice that could’ve sold shoes to a fish, “If you love this family, you do not touch this crate.” Someone should’ve handed her a badge.
We loaded Buddy into Dad’s old van. Mom climbed into the back beside the crate, a clean plastic tote stacked with supplies at her knee. She fastened a belt around her waist like she was riding a plane through a storm she’d chosen on purpose. I slid into the passenger seat. Dad took the wheel. Dr. Lin started his car behind us, hands at ten and two like a picture in a pamphlet. Agent Ramirez got into an SUV at point, radioed something short and final, and the street unknotted just enough to let us out.
The convoy rolled: Ramirez’s SUV, our van, Dr. Lin’s sedan, the two bikes trailing—silent guardians. Snow feathered down, sticky and soft, laying a quieter version of the town over the one we knew. On the sidewalk, people lifted phones and notepads and opinions. Kira didn’t lift hers.
I kept my eyes on the baby monitor, watching Buddy’s chest make little mountains and valleys. “You’re okay,” I whispered, and he was until he wasn’t, and then he was again. Mom murmured numbers—counting breaths, counting minutes. Dad’s jaw ticked time.
We made it four blocks before the circus found us.
A pickup swerved in beside us, horn blaring, a sign duct-taped across its tailgate: HEROES DON’T COMPLY. The driver hung out the window and shouted that word people use when they want to make a fight worth something. Two cars back, a woman cried into a phone. On the opposite curb, somebody in scrubs waved a face shield like a flag.
Agent Ramirez tightened the bubble, lights on but siren off. The Guardian Riders fanned out with a grace that looked like habit. The taller rider drifted his bike half a lane to the left, easing the pickup back where it belonged without the theater of a middle finger. The shorter rider dropped behind the sedan that wanted to draft off us and became a moving polite no.
At a traffic circle, a cameraman jogged into the crosswalk and then realized he was a human being in front of actual vehicles and scrambled back. The pickup edged up again, too close. Dad’s knuckles tightened. “I’ve got it,” he said to the wheel we already trusted.
Agent Ramirez’s voice came through a speaker I didn’t know our van had. Calm. Practiced. Human. “Everyone gets where they’re going today,” she said to the air. “Make good choices so I don’t have to make them for you.”
The pickup fell back two car lengths. One of the Riders tapped the driver’s door with a knuckle and a look that translated universally as not today.
I shouldn’t have looked at my phone. Of course I did. Kira had posted a still image of the crate on our porch with a caption I didn’t hate: “This family is taking a third road: not a needle in a panic, not a denial in pride. Hold them up. Hold your tongues.” The comments, for once, looked like people in a line for coffee: impatient, human, not yet unruly.
“ETA?” Mom asked from the back.
“Forty-two minutes,” Dr. Lin said over speakerphone. “Roads are okay once we hit the county line.”
“Forty-two,” Dad echoed, as if it were a number you could hug.
We crossed the river and the world opened. Fields lay flat and white like sheets pulled up to a chin. A wind farm ticked its giant second hand against the sky. I watched Buddy breathe. I did not cry. I did not stop wanting to.
Halfway there, the world tried to split us open.
A black SUV slalomed into our lane and braked hard in front of Ramirez, a maneuver that belongs to action movies and bad decisions. She didn’t slam horns. She slid left, then right, easing the idiot into irrelevance. The SUV tried again, this time aiming for us. Dad went cold and precise, the way a person drives when everything they love is sitting on the wheel with them. The Guardian Rider on our right rolled his bike between us and the SUV and looked directly into the driver’s eyes through tinted glass. Whatever he communicated worked. The SUV backed off, a sulk wearing chrome.
But the stop-start chaos was enough. Somewhere in the shuffle of brakes and hearts, Kira’s compact Prius—God love her—had tried to tuck in behind Dr. Lin’s sedan to “help,” drifted too far into a closed lane, and met a roadblock she couldn’t charm. Lights flashed in her rearview. An officer stepped out with a posture that said we’re done pretending, and within sixty seconds the only influencer on Maple Street had her wrists gently cuffed for obstructing a public safety operation.
“Keep your phone in your pocket,” Mom said drily, as if Kira could hear her across counties and consequences.
The highway spat us out near a line of old factories blinking their red lights into noon. The facility was tucked behind a feed store, a low building with honest windows and a hand-painted sign that just said “WESTSIDE BOARD & CARE.” Someone had taped paper over the lettering. New words in black marker: TEMPORARILY CLOSED BY ORDER OF COUNTY HEALTH.
Dad killed the engine. The quiet rang.
A man in a quilted jacket stepped out from under the awning, hat in hand, eyes like a dog who’d seen too many suitcases. He didn’t bother with euphemism. “We had a loss this morning,” he said. “A seizure case. The county said shut it down. I’m sorry. I called your vet—he’s the one who told me you were coming. I tried—” He held up empty hands. “They say it’s about due process. They say tomorrow they’ll have a protocol. I didn’t know you’d be today.”
Mom’s fingers curled around the crate handle and then let go like it burned. “I can monitor him in the van,” she said to Ramirez. “Portable O2, suction, the works. But if he worsens—”
“There’s the fairgrounds three miles up,” the man blurted, grief turning into help. “We used the livestock barn during the flood two years back. It’s open-air but we can cordon a corner, plug in heaters. Not pretty. But space.”
Agent Ramirez pinched the bridge of her nose. A person whose decisions become other people’s headlines doesn’t get to say I need a minute. She took exactly one anyway. “We can secure the fairgrounds,” she said finally. “We can make a ring inside a ring. We can post a perimeter and keep the public out. It’s not perfect. It might be enough.”
“Clock,” Dad said.
“Three hours, twenty-one minutes,” Ramirez said, and I hated the way her watch owned us.
The guardian riders looked at each other. One nodded once. “We’ll sweep the barn,” he said. “Make sure you’re not walking into a mess.”
“Go,” Ramirez said. “No heroics.”
“Only the boring kind,” he replied, and the bikes rolled out again, two quiet planets tugging the convoy with gravity.
We parked at the edge of the feed store lot while the world rearranged itself. The wind slid under the van and made it shiver. Mom cracked the tarp’s corner to look at Buddy’s eyes without giving up a molecule more air than necessary. He blinked slow, as if we’d asked him to wait for a bus and he was politely agreeing.
My phone buzzed: UPDATE: Hannah remains under observation. Fever down one degree. I read it twice and let the relief arrive on tiptoe.
Dr. Lin rapped lightly on Dad’s window. “If we go fairgrounds, I want a hard line between public and your space,” he said. “We set the crate inside a penned square. We run a cable to the heater. We do nothing dramatic. We watch.”
Ramirez’s radio scratched. “Fairgrounds secure,” a voice said. “West side barn empty. Officers posted. Riders inside. You’ve got a path.”
We pulled back onto the road like a parade no one had planned. The fairgrounds gates yawned open, and for a minute everything felt simple: a rectangle of gravel, a barn with red paint peeling like sunburn, a stretch of winter sky that didn’t care who lived under it.
Inside the barn, dust motes turned in the cold light like slow snow. The Guardian Riders had made a square with cattle panels and baling twine that looked like it could hold an idea in place if you asked nicely. Someone had dragged two propane heaters into the corner and run extension cords like lifelines. An officer stood with his back to the door and his eyes on us, which felt like a promise: You are the thing to protect today.
We rolled Buddy’s crate into the square. Mom clipped a monitor to the handle and turned it on. The steady green line felt like a lullaby hummed by a machine.
“It smells like hay,” I said, because sometimes you have to say a small true thing to keep from drowning in a big one.
“It smells like summer,” Dad said, and for a half-second we were all in a July that hadn’t happened yet.
The man from the feed store hovered near the door, hat twisting in his hands. “Scout,” he said, catching my eye, voice catching. “The dog who… this morning. He boarded here last week.” He looked away like the word sorry had sharp edges. “He was a good dog.”
The name slid through me like a shadow: Scout, from the video, from the messages. A dog who’d died in a room that looked like someone’s laundry. A family who had recorded it because proof is the currency you spend when no one believes you’re hurting enough.
I crouched outside the pen and set my hands on my knees because I wanted to reach through the bars and put my forehead to Buddy’s and couldn’t. “We’re here,” I said. “We brought the worst blanket and the best sock.”
Buddy’s tail thumped once. He closed his eyes, just for a blink. The heaters clicked, catching.
Outside, a new sound stitched itself to the wind: the low throb of engines that didn’t belong to our convoy. Not sirens. Not trucks. A gathering of cars with opinions, drawn by a hive mind that found us wherever we went.
Agent Ramirez stepped toward the barn door and squared her shoulders like a person who would rather be tired later than sorry now. “We’ll hold,” she said. “We will hold this line.”
The baby monitor ticked in my hand. Two hours, fifty-eight minutes.
And in the corner of the barn, under the red paint and the winter light, a hand-lettered sign from some long-ago county fair hung crooked on a nail: BEST IN SHOW.
I looked at Buddy and thought, not for the first time, that the universe had a way of telling jokes with perfect timing and terrible manners.
The wind lifted. The doors rattled. The first shout rolled in from the parking lot like weather.
And somewhere in all that noise, Buddy sneezed—just once, soft—and laid his chin back on Noah’s dinosaur sock like a king settling his crown.