Kennedy Stern Christian Suspense Complete Box Set (Books 1-9)

Infected-2

“Already? I’m serious, honey, you really need to stop drinking so much water. It can’t be good for your kidneys.”

“Actually ...” Carl began, but Sandy cut him off.

“Hold on, let me remember. There’s something I’ve got to tell Kennedy. Now what was it? You know Woong starts getting ready for bed at eight, right? It takes him quite a long time to settle down.”

“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Kennedy said, not feeling nearly as certain as she tried to sound.

Sandy took a step toward the door then spun around on her heel. “Oh! That’s what it was.” She bustled past and pulled a piece of paper off the top of the microwave. “This is a letter from Woong’s school. I forgot to send it with him today. It’s already signed. It needs to go back with his things tomorrow. They just want to make sure we’re all going to be careful about not sending our kids to school sick. You know how it is with that virus scare.” She turned to her husband. “What’s it called again? Napa? Something like that?”

“Napa’s wine country.” Carl opened the door to the garage. “You’re talking about Nipah. The Nipah virus.”

“No, you’re thinking about where the Dalai Lama lives, aren’t you?”

“Not Nepal, woman! Nipah. It’s the Nipah virus.” Beads of sweat coalesced on Carl’s forehead.

“Oh, that’s right. Well, that’s why the school needs the letter, hon. Be sure Woong takes that form to school tomorrow or they might send him home.”

Carl shook his head. “Government overreach,” he mumbled.

“It’s an epidemic, darling. People have been dying.” Sandy’s voice was patient, her southern drawl even more pronounced than normal.

“People die all the time,” Carl inserted. “The way I see it, when it’s my time to go, nothing here’s gonna dare hold me back, and that’s true whether it’s old age or a freak accident or Nipah virus that shoots me off to glory. Now, I’m all for basic precautions. What I’m not for is fear and paranoia. The way the media’s slanting this, I guarantee you there’ll be riots before the week’s out. And then they’ll start rounding up carriers, enforcing quarantines, it’ll be 1984. It begins when the government steps in and denies parents their basic rights. Just like that little boy whose family refused chemo, remember him? Courts get a whiff of it and ...”

“I don’t think Kennedy needs to worry about chemotherapy today. She just needs to remember to get Woong’s form to school.” She turned to Carl with a smile. “Ok, babe. You ready?”

Carl sighed, dejected. “All right. I’m off my soap box.” He looked back once at Kennedy. “You be sure to call if you have any problems, you hear? Especially if your problems start in the hour to half-hour before the curtains rise at the opera. Got that?” He winked.

“Oh, you silly thing.” Sandy swatted him playfully and followed him into the garage, where the St. Margaret youth group’s tie-dyed Volkswagon bus waited for them. Kennedy had to chuckle at the thought of the Lindgrens actually driving that thing to dinner at Isabella’s and then the opera. Since she’d never learned how to handle a stick shift, she lucked out and would keep the much more respectable Honda to take Woong to and from school.

“Have fun,” she called out after them. “And happy anniversary.”

CHAPTER 3“Hey, there. How was your day?” Kennedy asked as Woong flung his backpack onto the seat next to her. Kennedy wasn’t sure which surprised her more, how quickly he had learned English or how fast he’d put on weight. Last summer when the Lindgrens brought all forty-two pounds of him home from South Korea, the pediatrician had said she’d guess he was only five or six, except the orphanage workers had pieced together enough of his personal history to know he had to be at least ten, probably even a little older.

Woong sulked, and Kennedy had to remind him three times to buckle his seatbelt before they could start driving. She had no idea what an ordeal it was to pick up a child from Medford Academy. The line of cars stretched two blocks down the road. If Kennedy had been even a minute later, she would have had to wait all the way across the street or else the tail of the Honda would stick out into the intersection.

“How did school go?” Kennedy asked when she finally found an opening where she could pull out into the congested traffic.

“Ok.”

“Anything interesting happen?” she pressed, remembering how much she hated these interrogation sessions with her own mother when she was Woong’s age.

“We got a sub.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Uh-huh.” He opened the glove compartment and pulled out one of the granola bars his mom kept perpetually stashed there. Kennedy thought about having him use some Germ-X first, but he was halfway through with his first bite, and she had to pay attention to the road. Who would have thought carpool moms could be so aggressive?

“Where was your teacher?” she asked after turning onto a side street and finally escaping the minivan gridlock.

“Went home sick.”

“Oh.” Kennedy glanced at Woong, who was busy peeling his second granola bar. “Hey, why don’t you grab the little bottle of lotion from my backpack, ok? It’s in the front zipper. Right there. Just squirt a little on your hands and rub together. It helps.”

“Helps what?”

“Helps you not get sick.”

“Why?”

“It kills all the germs.”

“Yeah? How’s it do that?”

“It breaks down the fat layer surrounding the cell walls.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Just clean your hands before you eat any more.”

After a few minutes of silence while he finished chewing, Woong asked, “Are my parents gone already?” He reached into a compartment beneath the car stereo and pulled out a baggie of goldfish crackers.

“Yeah, they left a little bit after lunch time.”

“When are they getting back?”

“Tomorrow night, but you’ll probably be asleep by the time they come home.”

“Does that mean I get to stay up late?”

“No, you still have school the next morning.”

He sighed dramatically. “I don’t like school.”

“Really? Why not?”

He shrugged. “Not enough snacks.” He shoved some crackers into his mouth and asked, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in school, too? Don’t you go to Hogwarts or something like that?”

She smiled. “No, not Hogwarts. It’s called Harvard.”

“Oh. Then what’s Hogwarts?”

“Something else.”

“Ok. So why aren’t you there now?”

“It’s my spring break. We get a whole week off.”

Woong kicked the heel of his sneaker against the metal bar by his feet. “Medford Academy doesn’t get spring break until next week. My dad’s gonna take me to a Red Sox game next Monday. That’s a week from today, right?”

“Right. You know how many days that is?”

She could smell the cheddar cheese flavoring on his breath when he opened up his stuffed mouth. “Eight.”

“Close. It’s seven.”

“No, eight.”

“Seven,” she repeated and rattled off the days of the week. “See? That’s seven.”

He shook his head. “No, ’cause today’s Monday, and the game is Monday.” He held up his hands to count on his fingers. “It goes Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, then another Monday. That’s eight.” He shoved another handful of goldfish crackers into his mouth, and Kennedy wondered if Sandy had to vacuum out the car every single day to keep it free of crumbs.

“I guess you’re right.” Kennedy turned on Sandy’s praise and worship CD before the discussion could digress any further. What had she gotten herself into? When Sandy first asked her to stay with Woong for the night, Kennedy hadn’t thought that much about it. She didn’t have any major plans for spring break. Her roommate Willow would be out with her theater friends running around New York City. If Kennedy weren’t at the Lindgrens’, she’d probably just be relaxing in the Harvard library. It’d been such a busy semester, she hadn’t picked up a book for pleasure since Martin Luther King Day. Her entire reading list that semester was for the film as literature class she was taking. When she signed up for the course, she was expecting some Toni Morrison books, maybe a few foreign pieces, the sorts of flicks her dad didn’t like (“too artsy-fartsy”) and her mom didn’t care for (“too many subtitles”). She didn’t realize her professor was something of a Michael Crichton fanboy who apparently considered the time period between the release of Top Gun and the advent of The Matrix to be the golden age of cinematography. Oh, well. It was an easy A and a chance to get back into reading some thrillers, a genre she’d avoided when her PTSD was at its worst. The reading list, albeit unoriginal, was so extensive she found herself wishing she had time for the classics she’d grown to love. Now that the next day and a half stretched out before her, she thought of how relaxing it would be to spend the whole day reading and wondered if she was really the type who was cut out to babysit. At least Woong would be at school tomorrow. But what would they do with the rest of the day?

One hour at a time, she reminded herself.

Or maybe more like one minute.

Kennedy liked the melody of Sandy’s worship song, the haunting tune, but she wasn’t so sure about the lyrics. Healed by the grace of my precious Savior. What did that healing mean, exactly? She was still trying to figure it out. Dominic, chaplain for the Boston Police Department, said God could deliver her from her PTSD, that through the power of the Holy Spirit she could be completely free. It sounded nice. No, it sounded glorious. To be released from those talons of fear that would grip her heart at any hour of the day or night. To walk around campus without being afraid, to no longer find herself enslaved to panic, paralyzed and shaking from fear. Most of the time, she couldn’t even recall what spooked her out in the first place.

As encouraging as her boyfriend tried to be, she couldn’t shake the feeling this was all her fault. That if she were more spiritual, she could overcome these demons, whether they were real or figurative. Dominic had never said so, but his steadfast, unwavering faith made her feel ashamed that she still hadn’t found her perfect healing. Then there were people like Sandy, people who assured her that God could heal her completely if he wanted to, but if he chose to let her PTSD remain, it was so that through her weakness, the cross of Christ would be lifted up for all to see. Kennedy was all for God getting the glory, but wouldn’t he receive that much more glory and praise if he just snapped his fingers and took her trauma away?

Healed by the blood of the Lamb of God.

Woong reached out his small finger, grubby even after his liberal application of sanitizer, and punched off the music. “What’re we gonna do today?”

Kennedy took a deep breath. Back on campus, she was used to waking up at six in the morning to get an early start on her fetal pig dissection before meeting her organic chemistry study group in the student union for breakfast. She could sit in a lecture hall for four hours and take practice test after practice test to prepare for the MCATs and still keep up with her Bible study and almost daily quiet time. She’d survived a kidnapping, a car chase, a skyjacking. She could handle two days with Carl and Sandy’s son, couldn’t she?

“Well, what do you usually do when you get home from school?”

Sandy had taken two and half hours that morning going over Woong’s schedule, but Kennedy had her suspicions that he might try to cheat the system. What kid his age wouldn’t? She expected he might try to convince her his mom let him play Wii until dinner or something like that, but he shrugged and grabbed another handful of goldfish. “We go home and have snack.”

“Really?”

Sandy had warned her about Woong’s appetite. Now Kennedy wondered if she’d been too flippant when she told her dad there was a whole month’s worth of food stashed in the Lindgrens’ home. The way Woong ate, they’d be lucky to make it last until tomorrow night.

She replayed her conversation with her overly harried father. She hated the way he always tried to make her even more afraid. As if her PTSD didn’t give her enough anxiety already. Kennedy wasn’t worried about this Nipah virus strain. Sure, some people were dying, but that was mostly in Bangladesh where the epidemic originated and other regions in Asia. It was different here in the States, with the decent sanitation systems and top-of-the-line healthcare system. Her dad was simply caught up in the media frenzy. This would be exactly like other epidemics in the past. People got sick, and then the researchers found a vaccine. That was their job.

All that made the Nipah virus so scary was there was no known cure. Not yet. But everyone was working. A few more weeks of doctors and nurses taking extra precautions, then they’d find some way to control it, and life would go on.