I keep thinking the quiet is louder than it’s ever been.

The farm is supposed to sound like breathing. Wind in the bluestem, cicadas ticking like a loose watch, the barn boards answering the heat with little sighs. Tonight it’s all clenched teeth and waiting. My boots are by the door, still caked with red dirt from three days of walking myself hollow. I can taste dust and old coffee and that coppery fear that won’t rinse out no matter how much water I drink.

Three days.

That number sits in my head like a nail.

⸻

This wasn’t how today was meant to end.

It started the way it always does. Dawn sliding pink over the fields. The cattle restless. Mathew already up, pretending he isn’t sixteen by carrying himself like he’s thirty, jaw set, eyes too old. He didn’t say it, but we both felt it. The way the world has been tipping since the virus came. The way folks whisper Necroambulist like the word itself might bite back. Slow sickness. A week-long unraveling. People changing piece by piece. No screaming hordes. Just neighbors who stop hurting, stop talking right, stop wanting bread and beans and start sniffing the air like wolves.

I told myself you were just mad at me. Eight years old, stubborn like your mama. You’d cool off. You always do.

I was wrong.

⸻

By noon, the town was moving.

Boots on gravel. Shotguns slung more for comfort than use. Mrs. Alvarez crying into her hands while Sheriff Dunn tried to look like a man with answers. We split up, the way people always do when they’re scared but trying to be useful. The woods to the north were thick with cedar and shadow, the kind of place where sound goes to hide. I called your name until it scraped my throat raw. Every snapped twig made my heart kick. Every patch of torn grass looked like a sign meant just for me.

I kept seeing your mother. The way she smiled through pain. The way she trusted me with everything and then left me holding the pieces. I promised her, back then, I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. Promises feel heavier when the world decides to test them.

⸻

The third day broke hot and wrong.

The forest smelled damp and green, rot underneath it like a warning. Sunlight fell through the branches in thin, sharp stripes. We found your shoe first. Pink laces. Mud on the toe. My hands shook when I picked it up. Mathew went pale but didn’t say a word. He just swallowed and nodded, like he was giving me permission to keep being your dad for one more minute.

We followed the creek. Water whispering over stones. Flies buzzing where they shouldn’t. That smell again. Sweet and foul all at once.

Then I heard it.

A sound I’d recognize in any lifetime.

⸻

There you were.

Curled up against a fallen log, leaves tangled in your hair, eyes blinking too slowly in the light. Relief hit me so hard my knees nearly gave. I was already moving, already calling your name, already imagining the weight of you in my arms.

And then I saw your leg.

Just above the ankle. A bite mark. Fresh. Angry red around it.

My chest went tight, like the air had decided it was done with me.

I know what bites mean now. I know the timeline. The way the sickness creeps, steals pain first, then words, then everything else. I know all of it and none of it makes sense when it’s your child looking back at you.

I’m here, I think, over and over, like if I keep thinking it, it’ll stay true. I found you. I won’t leave you. I don’t know how this ends, but I’m still your father, and I’m still breathing.

I take one careful step closer, heart pounding loud enough to scare the birds from the trees, and I hold onto that single, fragile moment where you’re alive, you’re here, and the world hasn’t finished deciding what it’s going to take from us yet.