Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead

by Jacob Prytherch

  I walked with new purpose, keeping my eyes on the surrounding stalks of wheat to make sure I wasn’t surprised again. I spotted the top of a tractor beyond the field, and when I finally left the crops I saw that the seat was covered with flies and dried blood, with a trail of gore leading from it back into the field. So it had been a farmer. I had destroyed them on their own land. Well, maybe they had wanted it that way. The question still remained, where were the others that had attacked them?

  I was now on another dirt road lined in places on both sides by large unruly hedges. The road curled around another field that had been turned for a new crop that would now never arrive and up to the front of the farmhouse. The sunlight was almost gone as I walked towards it, my boots splashing through mud as I followed the road. As I got closer the house came into more detail, looming out of the twilight. The walls were thick stone, probably over a hundred years old. Heavy curtains obscured the interior of the house and as I cleared the hedge I started to hear a low drone, which I thought could maybe have been a generator that was being used to power the house during the potentially never-ending blackout.

  As I walked into the forecourt of the house my senses were assaulted by an overpowering stench. Before me lay the site of a massacre. Bodies were everywhere, in various states of decomposition. The low drone was the buzzing of thousands of flies which took flight as I came closer, moving and swirling in a huge cloud over the rotting meat and festering bones. Looking as closely as I dared, I saw that some of the bodies were pulped, torn apart by what looked like...

  The shot rang out loudly and I dropped like a stone.

  5

  Building

  The lead shot slammed into a body to my left, barely missing me. My instinctive reaction to fall to the ground ended up saving me from the second shot, which came barely a second after the first, hitting the mud where I had been standing. I held my hands up in surrender whilst I tried to work out where the shot had come from. All of the windows on the ground floor were boarded up but I managed to spot one of the windows on the second floor which was slightly ajar, with a shotgun barrel weaving unsteadily as whoever held it tried to get a bead on me.

  “Please, I’m alive!” I shouted, not knowing if whoever was doing the shooting even cared about that fact. They may know I wasn’t infected and think I was some sort of looter. Perhaps I was making it worse and should have played dead but I didn’t trust my acting skills. All it would have taken was another shot and my body would jerk with fear.

  There was not another shot though, not yet. I tried not to think about what my palms were digging through as I dragged myself away from the window, keeping as low a profile as possible. Finally a voice rang out.

  “Stop right there!”

  I obeyed, freezing in place whilst slowly raising my hands again. I hoped that if they were talking they were less likely to shoot, although it could have just been a trick to make me easier to hit.

  I saw the shotgun barrel disappear inside the window and a burgundy curtain pulled across to take it’s place. I waited for a few moments, wondering whether if I started running I could make it to the relative cover of the hedgerow. Just as I started to push myself out of the foul mud I heard the noise of a bolt being pulled back. My gaze was drawn to the front door, an antique affair made from sturdy oak and cast iron bands. It was covered in bloody hand prints and superficial damage but still looked able to stop an army. It was pulled inwards and a hoary man in his sixties emerged, stooping slightly and blinking in the light of the sunset as he held the shotgun in my general direction. His aim wasn’t helped by an obviously broken left arm that he was awkwardly balancing the barrel of the gun on. His hand looked bruised, the fingers swollen and pushed out straight. The pain was obvious in his eyes, which were watery and red rimmed. His hair was mostly white, flecked here and there with grey. It was getting a little long but was still styled with Brylcreem, carefully held in place in a style he must have used every day for many years. He was wearing a thick jumper patterned with green and white zigzags, tan corduroy trousers and heavy leather boots, and his cheeks were covered in stubble as white as a layer of snow. He stood watching me for a few moments as I slowly started to get to my feet, hands still held above me. My backpack had twisted a little and was pulling me off balance, and as I moved a hand down to try and adjust it he waved the gun at me as a warning.

  “Keep those hands where I can see them, if you please.”

  His voice was low, rough as gravel but strangely polite given the threatening situation. I did as he asked, my brow sweating as I tried to stay still despite my every instinct telling me to run.

  “Now, I just want to go through what’s going to happen, so that we’re clear and there’s no surprises, understand?” he asked, taking a couple of steps towards me, closing the distance. I could see his nostrils working as the smell of the rotting bodies assaulted him.

  “I wasn’t going to, I just...” I started to say before he cut me off.

  “I don’t want to know. I’m sure before all this started you were a good person, had a family, or any other number of things that give merit to your life, but things have changed now and we’ve learned our lesson the hard way. Once their life is threatened, people are capable of acts they usually wouldn’t ever consider doing, which is how we find ourselves in this situation.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything,” I said, leading the man to roll his eyes.

  “Just, quiet. Be quiet. I want you to drop your bag, turn around and walk away. You’ll do it slowly and carefully. Move too fast and I'll shoot you. If you run, then I'll shoot you. Come towards this house, and I will shoot you.”

  “I can’t leave,” I said quietly, looking involuntarily towards my ankle.

  “Well I don’t think you’ll like it here soon. Those shots I fired will draw more of them to the house and they’ll find you a much easier target than us.”

  “Who’s us?” I asked, strangely curious despite my predicament.

  “That’s not important. I don’t want to know your name and I will not tell you ours. It makes this easier and that’s what we need right now. I think I’ve given you fair warning, now if you please, your rucksack. If you don’t hand it over then you’ll leave me no choice.”

  My mind raced as I tried to think of a way out of this situation without losing all of my possessions, or at the very least the food, although maybe his need was greater than mine... after all, he had a broken arm, getting supplies would be very hard in such a condition...

  “Your arm, how did you break it?” I asked as I slipped the rucksack off my shoulders and placed it carefully at my feet.

  “That’s none of your concern I’m sure,” replied the man, seeming to wince as if I just reminded him about the pain that he had forgotten. “I dare say you can understand why I haven’t had the chance to get to a hospital.”

  “If you leave it untreated then infection can set in, or if it’s a severe break the freely moving bone could catch an artery, or the marrow could release fat emboli,” I said, reeling off just a little of what I knew. The man’s face creased with a flicker of confusion as the conversation took an unexpected turn.

  “Are you medical?” he asked, his voice softening. It was the power of pain, I thought. It tired your mind, body and soul until eventually you’d do anything just to be rid of it. His desperation was my chance, and for my own sake I had to take it.

  “Yes, I’m a doctor. I can help you, it you’ll let me?”

  The interior of the house showed the signs of a siege that must have gone on for weeks. All of the hallway table tops had been cleared of ornaments and held what few weapons were available – a shovel, a garden fork, a hand sickle and also a couple of boxes of shotgun shells, both open and worryingly low on contents. After the old man had locked the front door it was barricaded by means of a large dresser which obviously gave it enough backup to remain impregnable, so far.

  The carpet was sodden with mud and water; obviously there had b
een some flooding in this area but the man had no way of clearing it or opening the house up to help it dry. There was a wide central staircase that went up to the floor above but the old man instead led me down a couple of stone steps through a doorway to the right and into a large dining and kitchen area. There were a few cupboards and shelves which seemed to be bare for the most part, while what little tinned food he had was stacked on a counter next to the sink, maybe a weeks worth. Pots and pans hung from racks across the cooking area and the thought crossed my mind that it would be quite a beautiful house to live in under different circumstances.

  The room was lit by means of an empty strip left above the boards that covered the windows, too high for any of the corpses outside to see into but just wide enough to let in enough light to see by without the aid of candles, at least during the day. Thick curtains either side of the windows showed how they dealt with the night and having to use artificial lights without attracting attention.

  My boots rang out on the stone floor of the kitchen as we walked over to a large dinner table set near a set of bookshelves opposite the cooking area. The old man sat down painfully on a polished wooden chair, laying his shotgun on the table and motioning for me to also pull up a seat.

  “It was about a week and a half ago,” he said, his breath a pained staccato as he pulled off his jumper, trying his best not to move the arm but having to shift it a little in order to work it free of the sleeve. “I fell down the stairs, of all things. After all of this death and horror, a step broke me. Just that little one, there, down to the kitchen.”

  Once I could see the arm fully it became clear where the issue was after only a few seconds of gently checking the bones. He had tried to splint the arm with a couple of wooden salad spoons but he hadn’t secured them well enough or in the correct position to be effective. I checked the blood flow to his fingertips. It seemed good, the colour coming back immediately after pressing, so he was only suffering some swelling after the break. I reached for a sheet lying on top of a pile of clothes in a basket nearby.

  “May I? I’ll need some cloth strips.”

  “Of course,” he said quietly. “After all, you’re helping us.”

  Us, there it was again. There was someone else here. Was he hiding them? Or were they hiding from me? I tore a couple of strips off the sheet and looked around for something suitable, laying my eyes on a telephone directory sitting next to a phone on a small side table. I curled the directory around his arm and tied it off near the elbow and wrist with the strips, before using the rest of the sheet to make an elevated sling for the arm, pulling it up towards the other shoulder.

  “The elevation should help with the swelling. It’ll heal in time but you need to stop using it for the time being. Here, I’ll adjust the splints and sling it up against your chest. You’re just aggravating the muscle damage,” I said as gently as I could. I wanted to stay on his good side, after all, he had let me in to his home. I also wasn’t confident I could get to his shotgun first if he decided I was a danger again. I needed to play it his way for the moment. The old man frowned, his rough voice raising as he seemed to vent a long held frustration.

  “I can’t just stop using it, rest isn’t really an option now. I’ve got to try and get some food from somewhere and there’s always more of them, every day one or more of those things show up. I can’t stop for...” he ran out of steam and rested a shaking hand on the shotgun.

  “Who else is here?” I asked again. His pain was the pain of helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds and somehow I could tell it wasn’t himself he was worried about.

  “My wife, Dorothy. Arthur, I’m Arthur, sorry. I... I forget everything these days, even manners. I’ve let you into our home now, so lets put the way we met behind us, if we could.”

  He raised his good hand and I shook it awkwardly.

  “Not a problem,” I said, relishing this fresh human contact. This felt natural, easy, not like the stilted conversations laden with threat that passed between Marcus and me. “I’m just glad to be inside at night. Can’t your wife help a little to take the strain off your arm? Can she shoot?”

  Arthur dipped his face to his chest for a second as if composing himself.

  “She can’t even sit up in bed by herself now. It’s this fever. She’s running so hot and there’s no ice, nothing I can do,” his eyes fixed with mine, dark points of determination in his pale features. “Please, help her if you can. I’ll be so, eternally, yes eternally grateful. It’s why I let you in here, I don’t really care about my arm. I tried to help her but I’ve no training apart from a first aid course about twenty years ago. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll definitely see what I can do,” I said, standing up. “Where is she?”

  Arthur got up as quickly as his infirm and damaged body could muster and led me back out into the hallway and up the stairs to the second floor. The dusty carpeted steps creaked under our weight, with the sound seeming harsh in such a quiet and still house. At the top we came into a what must be a vibrant and brightly coloured hallway under normal light but in the encroaching darkness it simply felt oppressive, it’s yellow wallpaper lending an unhealthy glow to everything, as if the house was jaundiced. The door at the end of the hallway was open, so I picked my way between the cabinets of ornaments and bookshelves that dotted the corridor and went into a room that was steeped in darkness.

  All the curtains were drawn, with only a small amount of ambient light spreading out from underneath them. There was a large bed in the centre of the room, the covers drawn up tightly around the neck of an elderly woman whose grey hair was plastered to her forehead with perspiration. A compress lay discarded by her side. As I came closer I saw her breathing was shallow and I didn’t need to feel her head to sense the heat that her body was giving off.

  “How long has the fever been this high?” I asked Arthur quietly. He had stayed by the door as if afraid to enter the room.

  “Since the morning, thirteen or fourteen hours,” he replied, coughing politely as he started to walk towards her. “I wasn’t sure whether to keep her covered or not. She’s sweating, so has it broken?”

  “Maybe. Dorothy?” I whispered to the woman. She was unresponsive, still breathing in short sharp gasps. Her skin was pale despite the heat. I tried tentatively pulling the covers back, folding them around her waist. She was wearing a floral nightdress soaked with sweat that clung to a body that seemed far too thin.

  “She said she felt cold,” said Arthur. I managed a little smile to try and relax him.

  “It’s common to feel that as the body’s temperature rises but I think her fever is running so high that we need to reduce her heat to stop the risk of, ah, further damage,” I finished gently. I didn’t want to say brain damage, there was no need to heap further details on the poor man. “Has she been eating?”

  “A little soup is all she can manage but even then she usually can’t keep it down.”

  “I see. Can you refresh this with the coldest water that you can manage?” I said, handing him the compress. “I also need some aspirin, if you have it. It may help reduce the fever. Do you have clean water?”

  “The tap, we’ve... it’s all we’ve been using. It should be fine, shouldn’t it? From a reservoir?” His voice had been so confident before but when it came to his wife his fear made his voice tremulous.

  “Maybe... but just in case get a bottle of water out of my rucksack. Oh, and...” I said, remembering finally what had led me to this house, “if you have any disinfectant, wipes or liquid, bandages, plasters... just, just bring me everything you have medicinal. We’ll see what we have to work with. Oh, and an unused wash cloth if you have one.”

  Arthur nodded solemnly and hurried out of the room as fast as he could, tottering carefully down the creaking stairs to the floor below. It left me alone with Dorothy so I busied myself with trying to make a diagnosis.

  I leaned close to her and spoke gently but firmly, trying to wake her in orde
r to get some much needed information. “Dorothy, I need to talk to you.”

  The woman stirred, starting to moan a little as she awoke. She was obviously in a lot of discomfort.

  “I, don’t... cold, I’m cold,” she said so quietly that I had to strain to hear the words. Her voice had a fragility that only the very weak possessed.

  “We need to bring your temperature down, just a little. I just need to know what other symptoms you have besides the fever, so we can get you up and about again,” I said, trying to sound positive and yet not overly flippant. She gradually turned her head to face me, her blue eyes fluttering quickly as she tried to focus on me. When they did she became visibly unnerved, trying to push herself away from me despite her weakened state.

  “It’s all right, I’m a doctor,” I said, starting to fall into my role with surprising ease. She didn’t look any more relaxed though, glancing towards the door.

  “Arthur,” she said quietly.

  “He’s downstairs. He’ll be back presently,” I said, standing up and moving away from her to try and help her relax. I went to the nearest window to open it for some fresh air but I only had to open it a crack before the stench of rot outside the house started to permeate the room. I quickly shut it again, hearing Arthur making his way up the stairs. As he came in the room he saw me and nodded apologetically.

  “I know, we need some fresh air in here but there’s none to be had. I wouldn’t want to risk letting that smell in here anyway, it might have caused Dorothy to feel this way,” he said, placing the various things he had found on a side table.