Read Online World of Echos by Kate Kelly - Free Book Online Page A

that
the park was designed to facilitate use. The people who'd broken ground here
had foreseen that Des Moines would flourish from a podunk nothing to a small town growing.
                Lucille
started to think back across the gulf of time, back to when she'd been very
young and the little village that she'd lived in along with Brent had been
stricken with something that they weren't prepared to deal with at the time. It
was decades ago now, although it moments it seemed like yesterday. It was before
the age of the internet and before the world had shrunk down so many seizes
that a doctor always seemed right around the corner, always at the ready to try
to fix whatever you said was ailing you. Not that such a doctor would have been
able to stop what had happened.
                A
chorea outbreak. It was like biblical times, she remembered thinking that even
as a child. The way everyone seemed to get sick at the same time, and the way
that everyone couldn't stay out of the bathroom because of the runs. But it wasn't
just the runs from a flu that was going to go away after a few weeks. Some of
the people that contracted it grew pail and thin, frail looking, like something
that would live in a cave deep underground there skin was so white. It didn't
take long for one of the old and infirm members of the community to pass in
their sleep.
                The
more she tried to think back over what had happened the more splintered scenes
of unrest entered her mind. She thought back to her father arguing with someone
in the village council, about how they needed to get word to the Bristol that things
weren't going well and people were sick. Lucille had a hard time remembering
what exactly had been the hold up, but from the blur of her memories she sussed out that it had something to do with politics.
Something about an upcoming election in their small community and how a leader
didn't want to look weak by asking for help. This was before her father had
gotten ill, before he'd faded and withered into a husk of nothing, winnowed
down to nearly nothing by an infection that no one really understood at the
time.
                Her
father would pass, too, like so many others in her village. Death's arms, she
reasoned, must have gotten tired embracing so many people. She wondered if
there was a God, and if there had been how he could have let her father die
like that. But at the same time she thought of how there wasn't some mystical
reason that her father had died, it had been because help hadn't been called
for in time. Not until scores of other deaths galvanized the community to
action was the villages leadership forced to call for help.
                By
that time most of what Lucille had known as a life was destroyed. She'd been
used to seeing Brent every day at the small, one room school house on the edge
of town nearest the mountains, but when everyone started to get deathly ill the
general quarantine was sounded effectively ending the educational system for so
many people in the rural community.
                After
that Brent became someone that she'd had to slip through fences and sneak
across fields to see. She missed him, not because she had a crush on him, but
because they'd been friends. When school had been a thing they'd often read
books together, or talked about what they'd seen while out adventuring in the
woods or on walks with their fathers. Lucille had felt like she could talk to
him, like he wouldn't judge her or make fun of her. He wasn't like other boys.
Brent didn't push people down and laugh, and he didn't hurt animals for sport.
He was the kind of person that Lucille liked to be around. He made her feel
safe, and beyond that she could feel secure that what she said would stay
between them and wouldn't be twisted back around on her to be used against her.
Brent had a good heart and was soft of speech.
                She
saw him pull in from across the