“Now stay,” he told her. “Stay.”
She settled herself cross-legged near his pillow, pulling the blankets up around her head and shoulder. Stifling a yawn, she swaddled herself in them again and waited for the next command.
Unsure how long he’d be gone, Tral poured her a cup of tea and made her a small bowl of reconstituted eggs, which he set on the bedside table. “It’s probably not what you’re used to, but it’s filling.”
Making a mental note to contact his uncle regarding an increase in food supplies, Tral left the house.
Winter had well and truly set in. Last night’s snow covered everything, a thick blanket of white topped with crystals of ice that glittered in the pre-dawn light. His breath fogged the air as he walked, heading straight south to the place where he’d found his little stray.
He wondered if she was still sitting on the bed or if she’d gotten down to wander the station house yet. It would be just his luck if she’d already figured out how to open the door. He could imagine himself returning home to find it wide open and the house empty. Would she have enough sense not to walk off into the snow? The wild pack seemed to have common sense in abundance, but what about a sickly house pet?
He tried not to think about it, because if he did he’d end up turning right back around and heading home again. “I don’t really want to spend the morning digging bodies out of the snow anyway.”
But he didn’t go home. Instead, keeping a sharp eye out for the wild pack, he tracked his way back to the hill where he’d taken yesterday’s pictures, and from there, he turned east toward the fence. He hiked almost a click and a half before he found a gap in the fence large enough for a human to squeeze through. Long blonde strands of human hair clung to the jagged edge, which effectively let him know he’d found the right hole. Squatting down, he looked through it. There were signs of some ground disturbance. An expert tracker might have been able to pick up footprints, but when he studied the dirt and leaves, all he saw was...dirt and leaves, and a heck of a lot of snow.
Prying the chinks wider apart, he only just managed to squeeze his greater size and bulk through to the outside. Walking up onto the barren road, he looked right and left, and then up into the empty sky. The commuter rail was a very distant line high above. Too high to detect signs of movement upon it. There wasn’t even the muted whine of a transport engine.
Sighing, steaming the air with his frustration and breath, Tral propped his hands on his hips and turned in a full and useless circle. He found no signs of other abandoned humans, and that was good. But considering how far away he’d found the little female, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. If they had all gone into the Preserve together, then he wouldn’t be finding signs of them on the road.
Tral had just decided to go back inside and continue his search along the interior of the fence, when his foot came down on a small, soft object that squeaked when he stepped on it. Glancing down in surprise, he backed up a step and, using the toe of his boot, dug it out from under the snow. What he found himself staring at, was a soggy, woebegone stuffed theslepod toy. It was pink and its tentacles were caked in mud. Half of them were stuck together, frozen into clumps. Reaching down, he picked it up and tried to brush off the worst of the dirt, combing the ice out of the tentacles until they hung stiff but free of one another. He tried to imagine his small stray, deliberately stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing to comfort her but this.
“I think I hate people.”
Stuffing the toy into his coat pocket, mud and all, he went back into the Preserve, pausing only long enough to half-heartedly mend the fence as best he could without any tools. Then he continued his search. In circling sweeps, he walked the woods, back and forth, digging into any abnormally-shaped snowdrifts in search of humans who didn’t belong here. He found nothing, and by noon he was more than ready—happy even—to call it a day.
Cold and wet, there was no sight quite as fine as the front porch of the station house rising out of the snow and trees. He must have put enough logs on the fire, because there was still a thin thread of smoke rising from the chimney. And the front door was closed; he was thrilled to see that. Such a thing might actually mean that his sick little stray had done what she was told and stayed put throughout the morning.
Kicking the snow off against the steps, he walked inside to find she was indeed sitting cross-legged and still mostly swaddled in her nest of blankets, although they were mostly just wound around her hips and legs. She had huddled in on herself and looked intensely miserable. So, pretty much she was exactly as he’d left her.
“Wow,” he said as he came inside. She really knew how to follow the rules. “You can get up now.”
He turned to close the door, which was how long it took for the smell of vomit to hit him. Tral froze, making a face as he breathed in a short breath. Slowly, he turned and looked at her.
Face flushed, she looked away, refusing to meet his eyes, but the closer he came, the more miserable she appeared. A quick search of the floor on both sides of the bed revealed nothing amiss, but the smell as he stood over her was unmistakable. And then he realized how she was holding the blankets. She wasn’t just swaddled in them, she had gathered the loose edges into her lap, wadding them into a massive ball of folded over cloth that she had rolled in on itself, over and over again.
“Oh dear,” he said.
Shoulders hunched, she didn’t look at him and didn’t move, not even when he reached out to take the blankets from her. He didn’t have to unwrap the mess to confirm he’d found the source of the smell.
“I guess breakfast didn’t agree with you.” Fully expecting to have to change the sheets, he pulled the blankets all the way off the bed, but she had done her best to keep the mess contained in that wad of covers in her lap. The mattress remained white and clean, but throughout the morning, bilious liquid had leached through the cloth and now coated her arms and legs where she’d sat miserably holding onto the vomit-soaked wad.
“Come on,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him to the bathroom. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She unfolded her legs, trying to scoot closer to the edge of the bed without touching anything. However, sliding off onto the floor broke her self-imposed silence. She mewed in pain the instant her feet were made to take her weight.
“Yeah, I know.” He told her as she hobbled a few steps towards the bathroom. “We’ll check your cuts in a minute. Let’s get you into the shower.”
She began to cry. It was very quiet, little more than breathy gasps, punctuated by the appearance of fat tears that rolled down darkly flushed cheeks as she shuffled along beside him.
Carrying the wad of blankets in one hand, he steered her into the bathroom, applying only enough pressure to keep her moving without forcing her to go faster than she could bear to walk. The vouka toxin was working its insidious damage. Once he got her into the light, she didn’t look very well at all. She was unsteady on her feet and that flush on her skin hid an almost grayish pallor just beneath the surface.
While she waited meekly to one side, he dumped the blankets into the shower and quietly rinsed them out, flushing all evidence of sickness down the drain. Transferring the dripping mess to the sink, he then unwrapped the bandages from her feet, picked her up under her arms and set her in the tub.
“It’s okay,” he told her as he tested the heat of the water against his own palm. “It’s not your fault.”
It was his.
He should have given her the second shot of antitoxin before he’d left this morning. He shouldn’t have told her to stay on the bed. He should have left her in the bathroom, where she could have thrown up without having to sit there afterward and hold it. This was his fault, and he felt the guilt keenly while she stood hugging herself under the spray of the water, weaving from side to side on shaky legs, looking miserable all the way down to her tiny, pink-dotted toes.
Her fever must have spiked. He was going to have to take her temperat
ure again and see if he could find a file on the computer to help him calculate the correct dosage of antitoxin. Maybe he wasn’t giving her enough.
Soaping up a fresh cloth—his last one, great, now he had to do laundry too—he cleaned her up as best he could. As with her hands that morning, she made no attempt to wash herself and only stood weakly in front of him while he toweled her dry afterward. Digging out his medical kit, he seated himself on the edge of the tub once more. There was no fight in her whatsoever when he laid her across his knees; he didn’t for a second think that was a good sign.
With any luck, she was done throwing up. He didn’t think he could handle being vomited upon.
When he lubricated the tip of the thermometer and slipped it into her bottom, she clutched his right thigh, her hands fisting in the excess cloth of his trousers.
“You’re okay,” he soothed, although she obviously did not agree. While he waited for the thermometer to take an accurate reading, he checked her bruises, smoothing his hand over her flanks. Ulali oil wasn’t comfortable, but it worked like a dream. Only the absolute worst of her marks remained, and even those were much fainter.
“See, what did I tell you? It burns like the devil, but it does make things better.” He gave her bottom a pat and then withdrew the thermometer: 102.5. His smile became an instant frown. That was considerably worse than yesterday. Setting the thermometer on the side of the tub, he coaxed her to stand, but the instant the bottoms of her feet touched the floor she tried to sit down. He needed her up where he could get a good look at her. Picking her up in his arms, Tral seated her on the counter by the sink. He tipped her face to the light and checked her eyes. Not only were the pupils dilated, but there was a definite pinkish tint in the surrounding sclera where tiny blood vessels had begun to burst.
Moving his thumbs to her mouth, he peeled her lips apart. “Open.”
She was dehydrated and there were tiny miniscule drops of blood beading upon her tongue.
This was not good.
Drawing back a step, he looked at her. Her shoulders were hunched, her face was both gray and flushed. She looked tired, sad and sick all rolled into one.
Fetching clean bandages from the medical kit, he rubbed her feet in antibiotic and then wrapped them again. He also gave her a combined shot of multivitamins, steroids and an elevated boost of antitoxin. She pushed away from him when she saw the needle, but it was a small thing to pull her in close to him while he lifted her slightly and jabbed her in the hip.
“I know, I know,” he said over her wail of protest. Setting the empty syringe aside, he gave her hip a pat. “You don’t feel good and don’t want to be messed with. Tomorrow will be better.”
In an attempt to alleviate her distress, he ruffled her hair.
Her wail came to an abrupt hiccupy end. She stared at him, a very strange look flittering across her face as she watched him pack up his medical kit and put it away. He dropped the soiled bedclothes, wash cloth and towel into the laundry machine and programmed it to clean, sanitize and dry, and by the time he came back to finish with her, she was still sitting on the bathroom counter but with the empty syringe that he had forgotten about in her hand.
Unsmiling, she held it out for him to take.
Tral reached for it cautiously, almost half expecting for her to jab him back—one could never tell what a human was thinking about doing—but she never did. She simply handed it to him and while he stood trying to decide what to do with it, she picked up the wad of bloody bandages from the bowl of the sink and held that out to him too.
“Yuk. I mean, thank you.” He hastened the wad to the laundry and added it to the cycle, then quickly dismantled the syringe and put it back into the medical kit. By the time he returned to the bathroom, he fully expected her to have the entire contents of the storage cabinets in her lap, ready to hand to him one at a time.
She didn’t. Instead, she sat where she was, waiting for him and wearily rubbing at her face with those small hands of her. The same hands that had just been handling the soiled and bloody bandages.
Tral caught her wrists. “Whoa, wait a minute. Uh, let’s get your hands washed up before you touch anything else.”
Lifting her down, he set her in front of the sink and turned on the faucet. She hadn’t done anything for herself yet, and so he took her hands in his and directed them under the tap. His little stray sniffled, tipping her head a little as she watched him. Now and then she glanced up at him, shifting from foot to foot, uncomfortable and yet content to watch as he washed her hands. She had such funny little people-like hands. Especially with her nails cut and painted to look like a real woman’s. Freshly showered, she even smelled like a woman.
“You really have been here too long,” he muttered over her head.
She glanced up at his reflection in the mirror.
Tral shut the water off. He dried his hands first, then hers. Lifting her into his arms to spare her the pain of having to walk even this short distance, he carried her back to bed. She lay down the instant he set her back on the mattress, crawling up to her place near the headboard and curling onto her side with her head tentatively resting on a stolen corner of his pillow.
She did not look like she felt at all well.
Digging into storage, he found some extra blankets and remade the bed. Then, remembering the stuffed animal, he dug it out of his coat pocket. It was too late to add it to the current wash cycle, so he scrubbed the little toy squid in the sink, trying to get it as clean as he could with nothing more than hand soap. He washed and rinsed it three different times, but it still looked like a toy that had been dropped in the dirt, buried under several inches of snow and then deliberately walked upon. His best efforts bedamned, it was still a very dirty squid-like thing that he wrapped in a towel to wring as much extra moisture from as possible.
Her eyes were closed by the time he came back out of the bathroom. She had stolen more than just a corner of his pillow now. She was lying on approximately half of it, hugging it in both arms. Either he needed to requisition a second pillow, or he was going to have to learn to sleep without one.
“She looks cute though,” he said, gazing down at her. “Sick, but cute.”
Bending, he tucked the stuffed toy into her arm. She rose slightly, raising her head to look at the toy and then at him, before dropping weakly back onto the pillow and drifting off to sleep.
Against the white cloth of the pillowcase, she looked even more flushed than before. He touched the backs of two fingers to her forehead, then her cheek, and then pulled his medical kit off the shelf. At the kitchen table, he mixed up another dose of antitoxin. This time, he gave her double the dose. At this strength, the antitoxin itself could be deadly, but he rationalized his decision by weighing it against the sheer number of vouka spines that he’d plucked out of her the day before. If he didn’t do something, he decided, she was going to die anyway.
By the next morning, however, he realized he had made a serious mistake. She was getting worse, not better.
First thing upon waking, he reached out to touch her and found her little body as hot as a furnace. And not just that, but her eyes, ears and nose were streaked by smeared trickles of blood. Sometime during the night, they had started bleeding. So had her belly button. There were even pockets of black-red blood trapped in pools under her finger and toenails. She rasped with every breath, dragging them into her lungs in short, shallow pants. And when she opened her eyes, the whites of her sclera had been completely replaced. Glazed and unfocused, she gazed up at him from behind striking blue pupils that were floating in a sea of deep, crimson red.
Tral jerked back so suddenly he fell out of bed. He looked at his hands, his bare chest, the beige sleeping trousers he wore, but the only blood he could find on him was around the hems of his pants’ legs.
He tore the blankets back to find her feet. She whined, a feeble sound. Both sweating and shivering, she tried to reclaim them, instigating a weak tug of war to which he quickly ca
pitulated. Working his way to her feet from the bottom of the bed instead, he stopped when he saw how blood-soaked her bandages were. He scraped his fingers through his black hair, horrified and backing away from a bed that looked as if he’d been slaughtering small animals in his sleep.
When she moaned, curling onto her side and trying to pull her feet back up under the covers, he made himself move closer. Catching her ankles, he unwrapped the bandages. While the cuts remained red and raw, he was relieved to see they didn’t look horribly infected. They didn’t smell foul either, which might have signified a worse problem hidden deep under her skin. But there was still the fever to contend with and it was growing worse by the hour.
Fetching the thermometer and lube, it was another tug of war to peel the blankets back and roll her onto her stomach. He persevered and won that minor battle, prying her buttocks apart to dab on a bit of lubricant. She let out a snuffling cry when he inserted the tip of the thermometer into her, but it died away and she fell asleep even before it took an accurate reading. 103.8.
The antitoxin was having no effect on the vouka poison. A careful search of her wounds revealed two pricks at least that looked already to be festering. Covering her with the blankets, Tral sat down beside her. It was nearly a full minute of aimless staring and scrambling thoughts before he finally embraced the realization that there truly was nothing he could do for her. Nothing. Not a thing. She was dying, and from what he knew of vouka infections and human immune systems, he knew this death wasn’t going to be quick or gentle.
He should end it now in a way that would be.
Frowning, Tral stared at his hands. He didn’t want to do this, but there was really no point in putting it off while she grew steadily worse, and worse, and worse. There were already beads of sweat popping out upon her brow. By noon, she’d likely be delirious if she wasn’t already. If he lived closer to town, this would be a whole different scenario. In the hands of a capable vet, the effects of the poison might be effectively countered. But not without that medical care, not in the heart of the Preserve.
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