by T M Edwards
The rattle of hospital bed wheels approached across the concrete. I pushed myself to my feet and stepped back as the nurses loaded Sam onto it and headed toward the second hospital tent. Then I spun slowly in place, just trying to comprehend what had happened.
The fan, and the electronics tent, were gone. All that was left was a mangled, smoldering mess of fabric and poles. Smoke still hung in the air, but from the way it drifted toward the broken, boarded-up skylight and disappeared, I knew we hadn’t succeeded in blocking the airflow. We’ll have to deal with that later.
Spotting my cane laying on the floor a couple dozen feet away, I limped over to it and picked it up. My head swam as I straightened and took in the crowd still gathered there. “Let’s get to work.” My voice came out gravelly and harsh. “Come on.” I waved, and gradually they went into motion. “We’ve gotta get this cleaned up.”
That was when I noticed the blood all over my clothes. Kit’s blood. No wonder so many of them were staring at me. As soon as I got most of them working on cleanup, I limped over to the laundry and pilfered a couple shower tokens from the box. Nobody would begrudge me, not now.
When I emerged from the bathroom with my bloody clothes wadded up in my arms, I saw Dr. Haroun step out of the hospital tent where they’d taken Kit. Her face told me all I needed to know, but I had to hear her say it. I made my way over to her as she wearily adjusted the hair tie on her ponytail.
“How is she?”
Dr. Haroun shook her head. “I’m sorry, Deidre. Her internal injuries were too severe. She didn’t make it.”
Each word was like a blow to the stomach. I reached out, wanting to comfort the doctor, to see that look of hopelessness go away, but Dr. Haroun pulled back. She took off her bloodstained lab coat and offered it to me. “I have to get back in there.” Her eyes met mine as she pulled aside the tent flap and prepared to step inside. “Deidre...this bunker won’t last much longer, the way things are going. You have to stop the spores, and soon, or none of us non-Resistants will make it through the winter.” With that, she stepped through the opening and I watched the flap fall shut behind her with a sense of finality.
She’s right. We have to stop the spores... before it’s too late.
***
I spent the night in the hospital tent on the cot in the corner, unable to sleep as I watched Sam with his oxygen mask. He was okay, they said. He’d been lucky. It was just some smoke, and oxygen would fix him right up. He might be sore for a couple days, then he’d be fine.
Fine? Are any of us fine? I dashed the tears from my eyes as Sam’s eyelids opened and he turned to look at me.
“Deidre…” He reached out a hand toward me, and I rushed to his side. “Kit?” His voice was muffled behind the oxygen mask. “What happened to her?”
I sank onto the bed next to him, shaking my head. “She didn’t make it. I’m so sorry. It was all for nothing.”
Sam closed his eyes and let his head fall back for a moment. When he opened them and picked his head up again, his eyes were intense. “It wasn’t for nothing. We did the right thing.”
Sighing, I looked down at our clasped hands. “We have to do something, Sam.”
“We will. We’ll start getting everything back to normal once I’m out of this bed.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” I brought my gaze back up to his face. “The bunker is falling apart, Sam. It’s only a matter of time before the air in here is no different than outside. We have to get rid of the spores.”
He regarded my face for a long moment, as if searching for signs of hesitancy. He would find none. “I agree. You know I agree. Come here,” he added when my face fell at the thought of the journey we were contemplating. I crawled into the bed beside him and he put his arms around me, cradling me against his side. “We’ll fix this. It won’t last forever.” Taking the mask off of his face with one hand, he kissed my forehead before replacing it. “Try to get some sleep.”
I settled my head on his shoulder. “There’s no way that’s happening. Too much to worry about.”
“You know, it’ll still be there, whether you’re worrying about it or not.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue. I settled my head on his shoulder. “I know, but I have to figure out what we’re going to do. Everybody else is affected by the spores. They aren’t thinking straight.”
Sam didn’t respond. When I raised my head to look at him, his face was peaceful beneath the oxygen mask. He’d fallen asleep again.
Taking advantage of the relative quiet, I worked on a list of things we’d have to address when we woke up. We’d need to check the water tanks, wash towels, repurpose any unmarred fabric from the tent, and see about re-using the metal from the poles. The list went on for miles, and the longer I thought about it all, the more depressed and exhausted it made me feel.
***
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I watched Sam cough as we loaded the car for a run into town.
“Totally. Hey.” Sam put his hand on my arm as I tossed my backpack into the back seat and tapped it to get Honey Badger to jump inside. “You know Dr. Haroun wouldn’t have released me if I wasn’t okay, right?”
“I guess so.” I stood, absentmindedly scratching the dog behind one ear as she gazed up at me with adoring eyes and her tongue lolled out the side of her mouth. “I can’t believe this is our last trip into Vegas.”
“Well, you always said you didn’t like Vegas to being with, so…”
“Right. I know.” I pulled my hand out and shut the door as Sam slammed the lid down on the car’s trunk.
“Anyway, we’ll be back. This is just our last trip before we head north.”
I watched him as he stopped to kiss my forehead before folding his frame into the driver’s seat. His optimism was more depressing than motivating by this point. We all knew the risks.
While I got into the passenger side of the car and Sam started it and headed down the dirt road, I thought back to our meeting that morning. With the big, blue tent just wreckage now, we’d stood outside in the windy dawn and tried to decide on something, anything, that didn’t feel like a suicide mission.
“You have to go.” Dr. Haroun’s face was weary and drawn. “One more serious injury or illness, and I’m out of most of my supplies. I need anesthesia, insulin, IV fluids, an MRI machine. I’ve got a patient who either has a tumor or an abscess, and short of giving him alcohol until he passes out, my only other option is doing surgery while he’s awake. At his age, that’s as likely to kill him as cure him, and even if I get biopsies, I don’t have any of the equipment I need to make a diagnosis. If you two can end the spores, we can move back into town and find ways to get power to the hospital so I can have working equipment again. As it stands, I have multiple people dying who I can’t save, and most of them have conditions I could easily cure with the right meds and machines.”
“What if the egg doesn’t exist?” I watched as Laura crossed her arms over her chest.
“I talked to a couple folks who said they seen it, but ya know how it goes when the only people left alive are the crazies.” Dave laughed, but cleared his throat and quieted when all he got was glares and silence.
“I think we have to take the chance.” The words surprised me as they came out of my mouth. Was I, Deidre Scott, really suggesting we take a huge risk? “The way things are going isn’t sustainable. Sam and I can’t keep this up forever. We have to find a way to get everyone else back on the ground. And with one of the fans gone, and the skylight broken…” I let my voice trail off significantly.
This time, all I got were murmurs of assent. I could sense the tension in the air, see how hard they were struggling against the spores’ effects. They were desperate for an end to this suffering. Ironic, considering Sam and I were the ones who’d lived like this long-term, and rescuing our people from the hell of the spores wouldn’t do anything to assuage our own pain.
“We’re here already?”
“You’ve been
zoned out for half an hour. Yeah, this is it.” Sam turned the car off and opened his door.
I opened my door and stepped out, then let Honey Badger out. She barked at me a couple times, then ran off to chase a leaf scuttling across the parking lot. “Didn’t we hit this one already?”
“Nope. There’s just a million of them.” Sam grabbed the crowbar and headed for the doors. “We left this one alone so we’d have all the little closer stores left once we started running out of fuel, remember?”
“Vaguely.” I grabbed two bright yellow carts then stood by as he pried the doors open. He waved me through and I left one cart for him as I pushed mine into the dim store.
“Holy crap!” My body reacted before my mind processed, and I ducked. The sound of a gunshot echoed back from the walls, deafening me. I raised my hands high. “Don’t shoot us! Sam, are you okay? Sam!”
Sam’s hand grabbed my arms and squeezed. I went stock-still as the cold metal barrel of a rifle touched the back of my neck. “Stand up.” The voice was muffled in my traumatized ears. “Keep your hands up.”
“I...I need my cane…”
“Stand up!” The gun barrel poked me harder as the person holding it shouted. I suppressed a whimper as I tried to both get up and keep my hands in the air. As soon as I managed to straighten, I spun around to find a woman standing behind us with the rifle in her hands. “Get out of my store, or the next one won’t miss.”
“Okay. We’ll go.” Sam held his hands out in a placating manner toward the dark-skinned woman with the gun pointed at us.
“Now!” At her roar, we turned and half-ran back to the car. Honey Badger came racing toward us, barking furiously, and I had to tackle the dog to the ground to keep her from jumping at the armed woman behind us.
“Sam, open her door!” Through brute strength of will, I somehow managed to wrestle the dog and myself into the car. Sam slammed the door shut and ran around to his seat as another shot rang in the air. Honey Badger was frantic, straining against my hold on her neck as Sam launched into the driver seat and turned the car on. He sped out of the parking lot so fast the tires squealed on the asphalt, accompanied by a third shot. “Damn, why is she wasting bullets when we’re already leaving?”
“She’s scared.” Sam took a deep breath and visibly relaxed his hands on the wheel. “Probably thought she was alone. She’s gotta be Resistant, so who knows what demon’s she’s fighting.”
I let go of the anxious Honey Badger and slumped back against the seat. “Just tell me you know another place nearby.”
Sam’s only response was a nod. As he drove through the deserted suburban streets, I tried to find a more comfortable position. I’d ended up on top of my backpack in my desperation to get Honey Badger in the car.
When we found the next store, I waited with the dog while Sam did a more thorough check to make sure we were alone this time. I watched as he cupped his hands on the glass and peered inside. When he waved me over, Honey Badger bolted to the closed sliding doors and stuck her nose in the crack, huffing angrily.
“Not the same place, stupid dog.” Despite his words, Sam was gentle as he nudged the dog aside and shoved the crowbar between the doors. We repeated our little routine with the carts, only this time, my heart pounded as we entered and until we were certain we were alone.
We wasted no time gathering supplies. I think both of us were anxious to get back to where we knew nobody would shoot us. At least I was, and maybe I was just projecting my feelings on Sam. Either way, we both worked quickly. I dumped every water bottle, soda and sports drink I could find into my cart until it was mounded high, then we returned to the car and loaded everything inside. One more trip to clean out the rest of the shelves, and we packed the car until Honey Badger barely had a place to sit, then we headed home.
***
The rest of the day was a whirlwind of unloading the car, packing for our trip, and trying to talk people down from paranoia-induced fights. By the time the sun set, I was exhausted beyond words. I collapsed into my cot, only to look up when the flap of the tent opened. Zena stood framed there. Before I could say anything she rushed over to me, sobbing.
“Please don’t go. I can’t bear it here alone!”
“Oh, honey.” Despite the ache in my arms, I reached over to stroke her thick, curly hair. “We have to.”
She lifted a tear-stained face to me, the shiny tracks barely visible in the low light. “Then take me with you.”
“We can’t. I wish we could, but we can’t.”
“But Honey gets to go!” The wail in her voice rose, and I shushed her, trying to avoid waking Sam inside the other room.
“I know. I know. But that’s only because nobody would feed her if she stayed.”
“I would!”
Reaching out, I pushed her hair behind her ear. “You’d try, but they’d fight you. They’d tell you they need the food more than the dog. You already know they don’t like her. If we take her with us, at least she has a chance.”
“Please. Please, Deidre, don’t leave me. You don’t know how awful it is when you’re gone.”
My heart broke a little bit as I stared at the distraught teenager. “I’m so sorry, honey.” I wanted to scream at her to stop asking, to stop demanding the impossible when I was only trying to protect her, but it wouldn’t help. There was nothing I could say to convince this bulldog of a girl that she’d be better off staying here. We all would. We needed to move fast and as much as I loved Zena, she was a liability we couldn’t afford.
So, rather than say anything that could provoke the girl into doing something drastic, I just stroked her hair as she lay on my cot. I ran my hand over the abundant curls until we both fell asleep.
When Sam woke me with a hand on my shoulder and a finger on his lips, it took everything I had to get out of that cot quietly enough to avoid waking the teenager who at some point had laid herself on the concrete alongside my cot. Her head was pillowed on her arm, and for once her bright, animated features were at peace. As badly as I wished I could at least cover her with my blanket, I couldn’t risk waking her.
I cast one last glance back at the sleeping girl as we gathered our things and headed outside. Oh, Zena. Someday you’ll understand. I hope.
10: On The Road Again
“I can’t believe we’re really doing this.” I stood next to Sam with our backs against the car that now held our two backpacks and as much of our fuel reserves as could fit in cans in the back seat. A tumbleweed rolled across the desert until it caught on a bush and stopped. “What the hell are we doing, Sam?”
Sam pushed himself up from where he’d been leaning on the car. “We’re saving the damn world, whether it wants to be saved or not.” With that, he opened the driver’s side back door and patted the seat until Honey Badger jumped in, then swung into the front seat. I followed his example and walked around to get in. I glanced back to find the big black dog trying to find a comfortable spot on top of our lumpy backpacks.
I watched Sam grip the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. He stared into the early morning light, his face pale and determined.
“What’s wrong?”
As if my words broke him out of his thoughts, he shook his head and put the car into drive. The haunted look in his eyes mirrored how I felt. “Nothing. Let’s do this.” He pushed the accelerator down and the car leapt forward off of the concrete and onto the dirt road.
Once we reached the paved road and our progress was a little smoother, I spread the atlas out on my lap and studied our route. Though Minot was too small to be on the map, Dave had given us his best guess on its location, as well as some small pockets of survivors that might be able to help us.
“Can you believe we might get to see other people? Well, at least people who aren’t trying to blow our heads off?”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
I looked up from the maps to watch Sam’s stony face. “What? What do you mean?”
“I don�
�t know, Deidre. You tell me why some stranger walks into our bunker and we not only welcome him with open arms, we trust everything he says and go running off on what’s possibly a suicide mission just because he says so.”
“If you don’t believe him, then why are we going?”
He sighed. “I didn’t say I don’t believe him. I just...something’s not quite right with that man. At best he’s rude. At worst, he’s some kind of closet psycho just waiting for us to leave so he can take over our bunker.”
I chuckled and gazed out the windshield as the desert sped by. “If everything was all right with him, he wouldn’t be one of us. I don’t think that means he’s a psycho. He’s just eccentric. At least they’ll have someone who can go outside, maybe even do some supply runs.”