Three days earlier...

    Sergeant First Class Booker Ashly Dunbar — just Dunbar if you value your health — dragged himself through the bustling airport with a limp and a grimace. The nearly twenty-hour flight and the corresponding turbulence had not been kind to the four healing bullet holes in his left side. The Afghan desert had not been too kind either, but the thought manifested into the ache on his side. He could not recall a time when he had been in that much pain, but compared to the alternative, he would deal with it just fine.

    The alternative, however, had not been his own death. After serving sixteen years in the U.S. Army, and extensive deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, the thought of himself dying had lost its menace. Yet, even the slightest fathom of losing any soldier in his platoon was a gut-wrenching portrait of the most absolute loss. Many of the men were significantly younger than the 36-year-old Dunbar. Some fresh out of high school, young enough to be his son. Although Dunbar had never been a father, he felt that losing a member of his platoon would be just as punishing as losing a child.

    That was why the importance of the pain in his side was as miniscule as a dust mote in the greater scheme of things. Despite a few injuries, namely his own, it had been a successful tour. He returned home with all twenty of his soldiers, though, not every piece of them — Private Adams, for example, lost two fingers. But without Dunbar, the damage would have been much greater.

    Dunbar's superiors often called him modest, but he laid no more claim to that character trait than the government did to the fact that it was incapable of minding its own business. Modesty had nothing to do with it. As far as Dunbar was concerned, providing assistance to others was just something that people did — well, most people. It was the right thing to do. Instinctive, like a mother rushing to the aid of a wailing infant. That does not, however, go on to say that Dunbar was incapable of accepting praise. He took credit were credit was due, but not for something that the average person was competent enough of accomplishing. There is no heroism in the orthodox, Dunbar believed.

    Aside from his beliefs, and despite the success of this last tour, he also could not embrace the reverence because there was still a ghost of his former grief lingering just beneath his shadow when he spared a thought for the tours that had not been as successful. These days, he tried not to think about them as much. His psychiatrist, Mrs. Avery, advised him not to out of fear that he could develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Dunbar thought she was full of shit, but took the advice anyway. There was no benefit from dwelling on things past.

    Dunbar, who was a tall, dark-skinned man that looked about as easily pushed over as a tractor-trailer, waded through the airport's rush. He kept his side guarded, quickly stepping around bodies that came too close to his. He thought that he must have looked ridiculous; one of the tallest, brawniest men in the crowd flinching whenever a woman with an arm-full of luggage came rushing by him like a pint-sized tornado. Although his mother always said he was "built like a Mack truck," at that moment he felt more like the reject of a soapbox derby.

    He thought that the airport had been overwhelming busy that day. More so than usual. He always knew airports to be congested with traveling businessmen, elderly retirees migrating south, and the occasional foreigner flying back to the motherland to visit family, but in all the years he spent booking flights and walking terminals, he had never once seen an airport as populous as he had that day.

    A stout, fair-skinned man in an expensive suit that shouted orders at, presumably, his secretary through the speaker of his slick cell phone collided hard with Dunbar's left side. Dunbar dropped his bag, the searing, blinding pain traveling back and forth through each of the four wounds like a pinball.

    "Sorry," scoffed the unapologetic businessman. With a grimace, he wiped a handkerchief down the arm that connected with Dunbar, as if some deadly contagion had been transmitted during the brief contact.

    It took everything Dunbar had not to wrap a hand around the man's throat and squeeze until his eyes dislodged from their sockets. Instead, Dunbar curtly nodded, recovered his bag and stalked away. It was a daily challenge for him to remember that he was no longer in Afghanistan. He did not need to resort to the brute violence he exercised overseas to keep his men alive. He did not need to fight anymore. He was home.

    If only he knew how wrong he was...

    He sat on the curb outside of the airport. Cars whizzed this way and that, dropping people off at the airport's entrance or picking someone up who had joined Dunbar in sitting on the curb. It was an endless transaction.

    Dunbar gently rubbed at his side. It was sore. Unbelievably sore. He had taken an Ambien on the plane, hoping to slip into a deep, comatose unconsciousness where the pain was just a ghost of what is was when he was awake. Ironically, the Ambien had not begun to take affect until now. He had to stop himself from dozing off on the curb. He snickered at the thought that, if he did fall asleep, people would think he was a homeless man that had spent the majority of his day panhandling until he got enough to afford a drink, and passed out on the sidewalk. In a way, the thought was nice. Everyone he had ever known regarded him as some kind of war hero. These people knew nothing of him. He was a blank slate in the midst of these strangers and their commotion; the faintest blip on their radars. It made him feel normal, if only for a few moments.

    He checked his watch after awhile. It was a little over a quarter passed three. His sister, Cosima, should have been there almost a half an hour ago.

    He sighed, shifting his dark eyes over the tightly-packed traffic. He hoped to see his sister's bright blue, meticulously cleaned VW Bug. The closest thing was a light blue mini van with the hood dented in like the horrible grimace left behind from a car accident. He sighed again.

    He thought of renting a car. The rental place was only a fifteen-minute walk east, give or take, but he decided not to. He didn't want his sister to finally show up at the airport to discover that he was nowhere to be found. A panic would ensue, and she would frantically search all over the airport for her male-doppelganger, stopping every member of the personnel to be reassured that Dunbar's flight hadn't gotten lost somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle. Eventually, she would get the police involved. Dunbar always regarded her as an extremist. She preferred pessimist; she said it made her sound less psychotic.

    An hour's worth of Dunbar dozing off on the curb and pinching himself awake was all he could handle. He hailed a taxi cab, which was a challenge all on its own, and gave the small Arab driver his mother's address on the east side of the city.

    At that point, Dunbar didn't give two shits if Cosima had a panic attack.

    The leather backseat of the taxi was sticky. He scowled, but otherwise ignored it. He would rather be ignorant than to know why. Either way, it was a lot more comfortable than the cold, hard curb he had been squatting on for the last hour and twenty minutes. He even had half a mind to doze off again, until the driver suddenly swerved around a pothole, jostling Dunbar around the backseat. There was another searing pain in his side. His eyes narrowed at the back of the driver's head.

    After a while, Dunbar began rifling through his duffel bag for the packet of peanuts he scored from a stewardess. Instead, a slip of glossy paper unearthed from the bag, floating down to the matted carpeting of the taxi like a wounded insect. He hadn't recognized it at first, until his calloused fingers plucked it from the floor. He flipped it over. Despite the pain in his side, the ceaseless series of potholes in the road, and the pungent stench of the taxi cab, he managed a smile. It was the photo of himself, his mother, and Cosima on the night before he set off on his first deployment. They were all sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of his mother's fireplace. There were paper plates with blue frosting smeared across them and a dozen pizza boxes in the corner. It was a dual celebration; Cosima's twelfth birthday and a going-away party for Dunbar. He had already had his party, with all of his friends and high school sweetheart the week before, but his mother couldn't bare him leaving without one last get-together. Dunbar was only twenty then. He had almost forgotten how long ago that was.

    His mother, Tracey, was the reason he was returning home to Ohio. She had been sick for a while. Actually, she had been sick her whole life. Tracey had had a compromised immune system since birth. What would be a minor cold to the average person would be life or death for Tracey Dunbar. This time, it had been the latter. The medication always worked, up until what was now being called "The Spread." Dunbar had only heard of it two days ago. What with returning from his last tour just five days ago, his injury, and his new status as an entrant of the reserves, he had not had much time to reintegrate into the informed portion of society. He knew more about what was happening in Afghanistan than he did about his own country.

    "The Spread" is what they were calling the United State's current viral pandemic. The media preferred to call it by what they thought it was; the swine flu. But those that had gotten the swine flu during the 2009 pandemic and lived to tell the tale disputed it entirely. After he had gotten off of his flight, Dunbar had seen a panel of ordinary people — a few soccer moms, a paralegal, and a couple of blue-collars — versus a panel of certified doctors on some television program on a flat-screen near baggage claim. The soccer moms argued that the current virus ravaging the population was entirely different than the pandemic of 2009. The doctors, in their monotonous tones and stoic demeanor, drawled virtually the same two lines, with a few variations here and there: "This virus presents itself in the same fashion as any other influenza. There is no need for alarm."

    Cosima believed that this contagion was the one that finally claimed their mother. She threatened to sue Tracey's physician on the grounds that she was a victim of medical malpractice, arguing that Tracey's symptoms should have been recognized and proactively treated. Whenever the conversation arose, Dunbar simply shook his head. He thought that Cosima was beating a dead horse. She had little to no case, and even if she had, Dunbar wanted no part of it. Tracey was gone. Her funeral was tomorrow. Dunbar had had his fill of emotional turmoil. The last thing he wanted to do was relive the last days of his mother's life in front of an audience of lawyers, a jury, and a judge who regarded Tracey as nothing more than a case file.

    Dunbar knew the reason why Cosima was still fighting so hard for their mother: She had to take all of it on by herself. Dunbar had wished for someone to be there for Cosima when their mother first fell ill; he had not yet made it back to the United States. It was unbelievably hard for Cosima to stand idly by without the faintest idea of what to do. During a brief phone call, it was Dunbar that advised her to begin the funerary preparations. She fought and argued with him about it, insisting that Tracey would recover. Ultimately, Dunbar had been right — the only instance in his life when he wished he hadn't been. There was no one there to help Cosima through it — her only sibling was halfway across the world fighting a battle that was not his to fight, and their mother had been the only child of long-dead parents, so it was not like Cosima had any aunts, uncles or cousins to turn to. Cosima mentioned turning to their father, but Dunbar pleaded with her not too. Dunbar and Cosima were the offspring of a sperm donor. Cosima tried to connect with him when she was twelve — against Dunbar's wishes, of course — only to be sorely disappointed. It took Dunbar two months to get her to smile again.

    The taxi's sudden jerking halt pulled Dunbar out of his head. He had had a habit of doing that as a child; sinking deep into his own thoughts so as to avoid dealing with things. He hadn't done that in a very long time. It surprised him.

    Dunbar spared a glance at the meter. He tossed a twenty to the taxi driver, not sticking around for the change. He had already collected his bag and hauled himself out of the backseat before the driver could mutter a word in edgewise.

    The driver had stopped a few houses away from Tracey's, Dunbar realized as he glanced at the house in front of him, old Mrs. McCulla's. She was mostly blind, but that had not stopped her from tending to her garden, whose bright green vines once climbed up the porch railings and bloomed with beautiful pastel flowers of a sort that Dunbar had never seen before. It took Dunbar a moment to notice it, but the current state of Mrs. McCulla's garden should have been deemed a crime. Weeds had overrun the majority of the dry, cracked soil. The vines, now a putrid brown that vaguely reminded Dunbar of week-old horse shit, laid stiffly on the porch. He thought that he should check on her, see if she was all right, but the last time he did that, nearly a decade ago, she chased him off with a broom, shouting something about "private property laws."

    He hoisted his bag over his shoulder and headed down the street to his mother's house. Or, as he would have to acclimate to, his sister's house. Tracey and Cosima signed a quitclaim deed on the house while Dunbar was on his last tour. Not that he minded at all. He had his own house with his own things, and he preferred it that way.

    The walk to the house was leisurely. His side continued to pain him, but the cool breeze felt nice after twenty minutes in a cab that smelled like an interesting combination of sweat, cigarettes, and vomit.

    He rounded the corner of the tall picket fence that encircle the property. It was badly in need of a paint job. The former white of the fence had peeled off in large gaps that revealed the genuine nature of the lumber underneath. He thought of mentioning that to Cosima until a more pressing matter appeared at hand.

    The stained-glass of the front door had been shattered into prismatic shards that littered the wooden porch. The door had been left wide open to oscillate on the hinges. It looked as if someone had tried to jimmy the door open before resorting to busting the glass.

    Dunbar panicked. He was sure his eyes were as wide as the afternoon sun that shone in the dark living room to illuminate the leg of a women clad in a pin-striped pant suit on the floor. He tossed his bag away, losing it somewhere in the front yard, but he was too terror-stricken to care. He sprinted for the house as quickly as the sharp pains in his side would allow.

    "Cosima!" he shouted as he ascend the porch steps. He slid to a halt in the doorway, his breathing as labored from the pain as it was from the sprint.

    It had been Cosima on the floor. She tried to sit up, but her arms gave out and her face collided with the hardwood. Her black hair was a tempest all around her face.

    Dunbar noticed blood on the beige of her blazer. He rushed to her aid.

    "We've been robbed," she sobbed. Her body shook so violently that Dunbar could hear her bones knocking against the floor. "They took everything."

    Dunbar pushed the hair from her face. She had once been beautiful. Her dark skin, just barely a shade lighter than Dunbar's, shined like a polished penny. Her high cheekbones and  ski-slope nose lead up to toffee irises that dared you not take everything she said as indisputably certain, and down to plump lips and a small chin that Dunbar always poked at because she was always so oddly ticklish on her chin. But now... now, she was not beautiful in the slightest. Her eyelids had been blackened to puffy clouds hovering over her eyes, so swollen than Dunbar could barely make out her pupils. Her lips looked as though they had been injected; two bloated flaps busted open and leaking red. There was a long, straight cut traveling down the length of her left temple to her earlobe. Like a soundtrack to the gore, her breathing came out in a loud, raspy wheeze whenever she exhaled.

    "They took it all," Cosima wailed. "They took Mama's jewelry, the lock-box with all of her personal information, her clothes, the television... My purse! I had the money in my purse to pay for some of the funeral expenses! Now it's gone! They took it all!"

    "Cosima, did you call the police?" he asked, pulling her into his lap.

    She clung to his shirt like a terrified child. "No. They left only a few minutes before you got here... They took everything with them!"

    Dunbar cradled her in his arms. Her wheezing had given way to hyperventilating. "Shush, it's gonna be OK, Cos," he whispered, trying his best to get her to calm down. He rubbed soothing circles into her back; that seemed to help."We'll get it back. We'll get it all back."

    They were still sitting like that when the police arrived. Even as a plethora of suits and uniforms asked them a series of questions, trying to pry information out of Cosima as well as coaxing them off of the living room floor. Cosima nor Dunbar had the will to move. Cosima was too deep in her trauma to fathom any definite answers to their questions. And Dunbar, compared to cradling his baby sister, everything else seemed unimportant.