The Player's Twins (Book Two of The Great Age Plague series)

Chapter Five

We met on the back porch, a sheet of white snow making it hard to see. The sunlight was glaring that day, bouncing off the snow and making my squint like it was summer. It was an odd feeling. I always felt tempted to wear sunglasses on a day like this, where the snow seemed to magnify the light and blind me, but it felt so wrong to wear something intended for summer while the cold pricked at your cheeks.

All he wore was a leather jacket, staving off the cold with a cigarette and blowing the smoke away from me politely. I was bundled in sweaters, but surprisingly did not feel as cold as I usually did because of all the extra baby weight. We were silent for a while, watching the grey ocean lick the shore, the heaviness of light weighing on us worse than the cold.

"This should be nice," mumbled Josh finally. I tore my eyes away from the ocean to look at him.
"In the summer. For the twins. We can take them on the shore and build sand castles with them."

I could almost see that, clearly yet not, like looking through a glassy waterfall-- not quite clear, but still tangible. A little girl and boy, each with chubby thighs and baby blue eyes. One would be blonde, like me, the other dark haired like daddy. They would be too young to run around, but the surf with it's loud crashes would excite them, and the odd texture of the sand would intrigue them. Sand would fly in the air in little fireworks, set off by baby hands testing out the world, watching to see if the sand would fly away in the wind or land atop their bald heads.

There would be me, in Josh's arms, Keon, settled on a blanket with his head titled toward the sun, and Cally, with her dark haired angel, putting sunscreen on her face after rubbing it on her baby's bare arms.

That is, if any of us were still alive then. Just as easily, I could picture my mother, wearing some conservative one-piece as she ventured into the water. If I thought hard enough, I could hear her soothing voice, coaxing me to let jump in, convincing me that the water was not too cold for swimming even though it was only June.

But I knew better. She was dead, and if life kept up the way it was going now, any of us-- Josh, me, Keon, Cally-- could drop dead tomorrow. Maybe it would be another round of the plague. Maybe the pressure would be too much and one of us would lodge a bullet in their head. Or maybe, just maybe, we would die in a blaze of glory, drugs firing off the synopsis's in our brains until they burst. It would sound like a bang, but end in a whimper.

"What did you even do?" I asked in a whisper. Josh sighed, took another puff of his cigarette, then looked down. He watched the ashes fly away in the wind before flicking off another orange ember. The orange turned to grey, crumbled to dust, and fell into the water below.

"You don't want to know," he mumbled quietly. My breath caught in my throat.

"Actually," I said, trying to keep my voice steady "I need to know. As.. as your sexual partner, I need to know. If you did heroin, you could have contracted HIV." The words came out robotic, yet still tinged with fear. Cold yet on the edge of panic. Possibly, exactly how Josh felt as he indulged in whatever mind-eating substance that night; unfeeling to my pain or even his future self's pain, but panicked because if he didn't get something, anything in his system, he may forget how to feel. Because that's what pain does to you-- it eats away at you every day until you shut down, trying not to feel, but then you panic because you begin to think that maybe, just maybe, you forgot how to feel completely.

I felt it every night, staring up at the stars and wondering what happened to my normal life. Keon, well, he had been feeling that way long before the plague because of the monster we call depression. And Josh felt it to, except his monster was far worse-- addiction.

"No, nothing with needles," said Josh pointedly "Ice."

I paused, thinking at first he was referring to the shiny sheen of ice coating the hand railing right now. Then it hit me.