3. Basement Life & Another Life
Basement Life & Another Life
Josie sat cross-legged on the basement floor, a blanket draped around her shoulders, watching Layla carefully shade the wings of a crooked butterfly.
The little girl’s brow was scrunched in concentration, her tongue peeking out — exactly the way Mark used to look when wrestling with IKEA furniture instructions he refused to read.
Josie smiled faintly at the resemblance, a familiar ache in her chest.
Thank God I hoarded candles, she thought, glancing at the flickering flames on the concrete room. Between her candle obsession and Mark’s compulsive need to buy batteries in bulk—habits they’d once teased each other about mercilessly—they hadn’t gone dark a single night since moving downstairs.
Everything that mattered lived down here now: food, water, blankets, and medical supplies alongside things once considered junk—printer paper and notebooks from Mark’s office, now priceless.
Layla worked through those pages almost daily, and Josie couldn’t deny the strange, stubborn comfort of watching her daughter color while the world above them fell apart.
“Mommy, look!” Layla said, holding up her butterfly with both hands. “She’s flying to a garden!”
Josie reached out and traced the line of her daughter’s dark curls. “It’s beautiful, sweetheart.”
Layla’s butterfly, with its crooked purple wings, was the most beautiful thing Josie had seen in months.
She traced one of the wings, the crayon wax sliding under her fingertip.
Purple. The color of the scrubs Tessa her surgical nurse always wore on Wednesdays.
The thought arrived sharp and unwelcome, dragging with it the memory of that last, frantic phone call.
She’d pulled out of the hospital parking lot, exhaustion clawing at her brain after a double shift, when she noticed the message waiting on her phone:
Mark didn’t pick up Layla.
Strange. He never missed dance pickups. Not once in three years.
She arrived to find the dance studio glowing with an eerie yellow light.
Inside, only Layla and one other little girl remained, both pressed against the wall with their backpacks hugged to their chests like shields.
The instructor—normally exhausingly chipper—stood pale by the door, her hands working the lanyard around her neck over and over without seeming to know she was doing it.
“I’m so sorry, Josie,” she said. “Only two kids came tonight. Everyone else called out sick.”
Sick. That word was everywhere over the past few days—across news banners, through whispered hallway conversations at work, into every phone call. A “rough early flu season,” the reporters kept parroting, as if repetition could make it true.
But the tone inside the ER had turned different. Darker.
Josie apologized, thanked the instructor, and hustled Layla out the door. The moment they stepped into the parking lot, she noticed the silence between the sirens. The city’s usual bustle was gone, replaced by a empty quiet that felt strange.
Sirens wailed from every direction, bouncing off buildings until Josie couldn’t count them.People staggered along the sidewalks, their faces ashen, eyes glassy and fixed on nothing.
A man doubled over a storm drain, coughing so violently his whole body convulsed, as though trying to eject something living from his lungs.
“Mommy, that man looks—”
“Don’t look, baby. Seat belt.”
Josie buckled Layla in with shaking hands and immediately dialed her friend Tessa at the hospital.
The call connected on the second ring.
What answered barely sounded like Tessa at all.
“Jo…sie…”
A cough. Wet. Rattling.
“You need—you need to get home. Don’t come back in. I mean it.”
“Tess, what’s happening? How many cases—”
Another choking burst of coughing tore through the line. Then, ragged and urgent—
“It’s not flu. It’s not—just get home. Now.”
The call dropped.
The sirens barely registered over the blood rushing through Josie’s ears.
She had two choices.
Go straight home, lock the doors, and pray they had enough to get through this .
Or face the chaos to buy them one more day. Her medical training screamed a hard truth: without supplies, home wasn’t a fortress, just a trap. It was a terrible choice, a gamble with the only thing she had left. She turned toward the grocery store.
Josie yanked the spare medical mask from the emergency kit in her bag and fitted it over Layla’s small face, tying the loops snug behind her ears. Then she wrapped her own nose and mouth with her scarf, silently cursing herself for leaving her full gear at the hospital.
Inside, people shouted, grabbed, and shoved past one another without apology. A woman wept openly in the middle of an aisle, clutching a bag of rice to her chest like a prayer. The shelves had already been stripped bare of water and cleaning supplies, entire sections reduced to scattered debris.
“Stay close,” she whispered, gripping Layla’s hand hard enough to hurt them both.
They moved fast, methodically, the familiar adrenaline of the ER shoving her fear aside.
Canned food. Crackers. Bottled juice. Protein bars. Cold medicine. Batteries. Matches. Painkillers. Whatever water remained.
Every few aisles, someone collapsed. Someone screamed. Someone fought over a cart.
But the worst part had nothing to do with any of that—it came from the creeping recognition settling over her, colder than any fear she’d known:
This wasn’t a panic beginning.
This was a panic already fully in progress.
After nearly tipping the overloaded cart, Josie sprinted with Layla toward the checkout.
Behind them, someone crashed through an entire display of cereal boxes.
Up front, the cashier stood frozen, staring at the flickering news broadcast mounted overhead—eyes wide, hands motionless over the register—while the anchor’s voice shook through the store’s speakers:
“This is not the flu. Stay in your homes. Do not go to work. Do not go to public spaces. Do not—”
The screen cut to black.
“Mommy?” Layla whispered from behind her mask. “What’s happening?”
Josie forced a smile her daughter couldn’t see and wouldn’t have believed anyway.
“We’re going home, baby.”
She pushed the cart out into the night forgoing paying as a fresh wave of sirens rose across the city.
Back in the basement, Josie crashed back in to reality.
At some point, Layla had crawled into her lap, small arms wrapped around Josie’s waist, the butterfly drawing forgotten on the floor beside them.
Josie pressed a long kiss to the top of her daughter’s head.
“We’re okay,” she whispered—to Layla, to herself.
“We’re okay.”
Even if the world upstairs no longer was.
The next morning, the sky was dark, promising another dump of snow before noon. The group moved through their routines: Addy tending breakfast inside, Sawyer splitting kindling by the door, Cara out checking snares. Jay sat sharpening an axe on the porch steps when Seth stepped out of the cabin.
He didn’t move like the confident, capable man who’d been growing stronger by the week. This Seth came out stiff and hesitant, shoulders drawn tight beneath his jacket. His eyes swept the tree line with the haunted look of a man expecting an attack he knew was coming.
Jay didn’t miss any of it.
He’d seen that look before.
He’d worn it himself, years ago, back when everything in his own world had gone to hell and he’d walked around pretending otherwise.
Seth walked over, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck. “Morning.”
Jay grunted a greeting, tracking the younger man’s tense movements without turning his head. Seth started stacking wood, but his movements lacked their usual pep.
Finally, Jay said, without looking up from the blade, “Didn’t see you eat much at breakfast.”
Seth shrugged. “Wasn’t hungry.”
“Mm,” Jay hummed. “Something bothering you?”
Seth hesitated—only for a second, but long enough for Jay to catch it.
Then he forced a smile. “Just thinking, about our upcoming supply run.”
“Yeah.” Jay pushed himself to his feet, leaning an arm on the axe handle. “You’ve handled worse than a supply run.”
Seth didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
The silence said everything.
Jay looked from Seth to the axe blade and back again, catching the small tells: The tremor in Seth’s fingers.
The anxious shift of his weight. The way his gaze kept darting to the treeline as if something out there were calling to him.
Jay felt a familiar, unwelcome feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“You sleeping alright?” Jay asked, his voice low.
“Yeah fine.” Too fast.
Jay nodded slowly. “Right.”
Seth swallowed, his eyes darting back to the woods. “Look, I’m good, Jay. I can do the run.”
“I never said you couldn’t,” Jay replied, his voice even.
Seth’s shoulders tightened, his flinch disguised as a stretch. “I’m fine.”
Jay didn’t call him a liar. Didn’t push. Didn’t corner him.
He simply said, “You’re allowed to not be.”
Seth’s demeanor changed.
Seth looked away. He crouched, picked up a piece of split wood from the pile at his feet, turned it over once, and set it back down. Jay looked at the axe’s blade.
Jay laid a hand on Seth’s shoulder. “Listen… when we head out in spring, you won’t be alone out there. I’ll have your back, and you’ll have mine. That’s how this works. So whatever’s eating at you—you don’t have to carry it out there with us. You can set some of it down first.”
Seth blinked hard at the snow-dusted ground, his throat working.
The silence stretched, filled with everything Seth wasn’t saying.
Then—
“…Thanks.”
One word. Barely heard above the wind.
But Jay understood exactly what it meant.
Sawyer stepped out onto the porch then, axe in hand. “Everything good out here?”
Seth straightened instantly, his mask sliding back into place. “Yeah. All good.”
But as Jay met Sawyer’s eyes, he gave a single, tiny shake of his head.
The gesture was all it took.