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“And the haircut,” said the second. “Looks like somebody sculped him. Hey short bus kid!”
Willie stopped hugging himself and looked up at them.
“Your face looks suspiciously like my ass,” said the first, and accepted a high five from his companion.
Willie looked back down at the dead mole. It was moving toward the sewer grate, but very slowly. He didn’t believe it was going to make it. At least not unless it started raining again.
Number One kicked him in the hip and proposed beating him up.
“Let him alone,” Number Two said. “I like his sister. She got a hot bod.”
They went on their way. Willie waited until they were out of sight, then got up, pulled the damp seat of his pants away from his butt, and walked home. His mother and father were still at work. Roxie was somewhere, probably with one of her friends. Grampa was in his room, looking at a game show on his TV. When Willie came in, he snapped it off.
“You’ve got a bit of a hitch in your gitalong,” Grampa said.
“What?”
“A limp, a limp. Let’s go out on the back porch. I want to smoke. What happened to you?”
“Kid kicked me,” Willie said. “I was watching a mole. It was dead. I wanted to see if it would go into the sewer or not.”
“Did it?”
“No. Unless it did after I left, but I don’t think so.”
“Kicked you, did he?”
“Yes.”
“Ah-ha,” Grampa said, and that closed the subject. They went out on the porch. They sat down. Grampa lit a cigarette and coughed out the first drag in several puffs.
“Tell me about the volcano under Yellowstone,” Willie proposed.
“Again?”
“Yes, please.”
“Well, it’s a big one. Maybe the biggest. And someday it’s going to blow. It’ll take the whole state of Wyoming when it does, plus some of Idaho and most of Montana.”
“But that isn’t all,” Willie said.
“Not at all.” Grampa smoked and coughed. “It’ll throw a billion tons of ash into the atmosphere. The crops will die worldwide. People will die worldwide. The Internet everyone is so proud of will go kerblooey.”
“The ones who don’t starve will choke to death,” Willie said. His eyes were shining. He clutched his throat and went grrrahh. “It could be an extinction event, like what killed the dinosaurs. Only it would be us this time.”
“Correct,” Grandfather said. “That boy who kicked you won’t be thinking about kicking anybody then. He’ll be crying for his mommy.”
“But his mommy will be dead.”
“Correct,” said Grandfather.
That winter, a disease in China that had been just another item on the nightly news turned into a plague that started killing people all over the world. Hospitals and morgues were overflowing. People in Europe were mostly staying inside and when they went out they put on masks. Some people in America also put on masks, mostly if they were going to the supermarket. It wasn’t as good as a massive volcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park, but Willie thought it was pretty good. He kept track of the dead-numbers on his phone. Schools were shut down early. Roxie cried because she was missing the end-of-year dance, but Willie didn’t mind. You didn’t get a dance at the end of the year when you were Remedial.
In March of that year, Grandfather began to cough a lot more, and sometimes he coughed up blood. Father took him to the doctor, where they had to sit in the parking lot until they were called because of the virus that was killing people. Mother and Father were both pretty sure Grampa had the virus, probably brought into the house by either Roxie or Willie. Most kids didn’t get sick, it seemed, or at least not very sick, but they could pass it on and when old people caught it, they usually died. According to the news, in New York the hospitals were using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies. Mostly the bodies of old people like Grampa. Willie wondered what the insides of those trucks looked like. Were the dead people wrapped in sheets, or were they in body bags? What if one of them was still alive but froze to death? Willie thought that would make a good TV show.
It turned out Grampa didn’t have the virus. He had cancer. The doctor said it started in his pancreas and then spread to his lungs. Mother told Roxie everything while they were doing dishes, and Roxie told Willie. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have done that, usually the kitchen after supper was like Vegas, what got said there stayed there, but Roxie couldn’t wait to tell Willie the Weirdo that his beloved grampa was circling the drain.
“Daddy asked if he should go in the hospital,” she told Willie, “and the doctor said if you don’t want him to die in two weeks instead of in six months or a year, take him home. The doctor said the hospital is a germ-pit and everybody who works there has to dress like in a sci-fi movie. So that’s why he’s still here.”
