by John L. Monk
Tony cast her a skeptical look. “I see girls wearing jewels all the time. Planning on starting a war?”
“That’s for decoration,” Sarah said.
Andrew raised his hand, and everyone looked at him. “Actually, I kind of want a treasure chest, too.”
Greg snorted. “I wanted to be an astronaut—a year ago, when my parents were alive. Now I’m gonna be a fisherman or a sailor.” He pointed at Tony. “You want to be a pirate. You’re still a little kid.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“No, I’m not!”
“Yeah, you kind of are.”
“What else are we gonna do out here?” Tony said. “Just go fishing? We still got time, so why not fish up the river? That way, least I can go in and grab what I want and leave. One day, when things get better, someone else is gonna. Then what? We’ll have nothing. People ain’t gonna be happy with cows and fish forever. Won’t be enough.”
Greg shook his head, searching for the right argument … and sensed a subtle shift in the group’s mood. They were listening, and they weren’t smirking anymore.
It was Sarah who spoke next. “Could it hurt to sail that way? Fish up there? It’s basically the same as down here, right?”
Chelsea said, “Don’t see how it could hurt.”
Andrew nodded at her.
Greg endured their enthusiasm with a feeling akin to hopelessness. This wasn’t the mission. Not pirating the nation’s treasures to get “rich” … whatever that even meant anymore.
Tony pointed at him, a wide smirk playing across his face. “He’s giving up!”
Andrew laughed. “See how he’s looking everywhere but us now?”
Chelsea shielded her eyes and stared at the far wall. “What’s way over there, Greg? It’s so distant …”
Greg grunted in disgust and shook his head. Thank goodness Jack wasn’t there to see how easily he’d been outmaneuvered.
“You guys are so immature, it’s not even funny,” he said, then settled into his sleeping bag for the night.
21
Jack didn’t know what to do. There was a tiny, puckered hole in Lisa’s tricep. Her left side had four more holes in it, right above the hip—two sets of two about three inches apart, suggesting exit wounds. Birdshot, it looked like, because she wasn’t torn up like hamburger meat. Whoever shot her probably thought all shotgun shells were the same.
Her arm only had one hole, but it looked tiny, like the ones in her side. Maybe from a ricochet. The wounds themselves didn’t look particularly dangerous. Red and messy, but no longer bleeding. And except for her arm, nothing stuck inside.
Despite her good luck, Lisa alternated between shivering and sweating. He had no idea how long she’d been there, but during that time she’d soiled herself.
As the leader of his group and now the Dragsters, Jack hardly ever made scavenging runs. That said, he knew they frequently tapped the hot water tanks when they wanted clean water. With the hose outside still frozen to the nozzle—and thus useless—he gathered the water in a saucepan before transferring it to a larger pot. Messy and slow. Ten minutes later, his pants and shoes were soaked, but he’d gathered several gallons. After transporting it upstairs, he pulled out his skinning knife and started a fire using strips cut from the rug.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, he thought as he stripped away Lisa’s soiled clothing to clean her, trying desperately not to look at her nakedness. He told himself she’d understand and not rip his head off when she got better. It helped that the house was as dark as a cave. He’d seriously emphasize that point to her if she lived.
When. Not if.
Jack wrapped her in blankets from a spare bedroom and lay down against her in front of the fire. She shivered in his arms, teeth chattering. A half-hour later, Lisa’s shivering went from continuous to sporadic … and then she started sweating again.
An electronic thermometer scrounged from a medicine cabinet reported her temperature at a hundred and four. He couldn’t believe it. Shivering with a fever? It didn’t make sense.
He tried to remember how hot a person could get before brain damage set in. Hotter than a hundred and four, he felt sure of it. If she got much hotter, he’d have to cool her off somehow. Maybe in the tub upstairs. He really hoped it didn’t come to that.
Jack tried feeding her water, but she coughed it up, so he stopped.
“Please wake up,” he whispered over and over. When she mumbled something back, he said it louder, but she didn’t respond.
Why was she so sick? He looked at the wounds again, and again they didn’t seem so bad. Greg’s had been much worse. Of the five holes, only her arm worried him. No exit wound, and it was swollen and red.
Jack retrieved her shirt from the closet he’d dumped it in. When he held it to the window, the area around the hole was caked with dirt, as if she’d slipped in mud at some point.
These days, everyone wore their clothes until they got so dirty they either replaced them or washed them. Strategic hygiene made more sense than showers, which weren’t available, or baths, which required a lot of water and a way to heat it. Dirtier people meant way more germs, and bigger problems when someone got wounded.
Jack grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the cabinet. Not wanting to use his skinning knife, because of the hook at the tip, he snagged a paring knife from the kitchen. After sterilizing it, he set about cleaning her arm. As he applied pressure to the wound, pus oozed out and Lisa’s eyes flew open.
“Kill you!” she shouted with surprising strength, staring at him like she wanted to do just that. She flailed wildly, hands hooked into claws while he struggled to restrain her.
“It’s me,” he said. “Jack. I’m here, now.”
Lisa’s rage turned to confusion and then recognition. “Jack? Why …. What are you doing here?”
“I followed your tracks. I’m here to help.”
“I’m fine … chickens are fine … don’t need stupid help …”
He was about to explain she wasn’t at the farm anymore, but her eyes fluttered weakly and then she was out again. Between waking and unconsciousness, her skin had broken out in a fresh sheen of sweat.
Jack didn’t know much about first aid, other than how to make a splint with branches, or a tourniquet in case of a snakebite. Cool stuff. Interesting stuff. Not this stuff. Not bullet holes and infections. When Greg got shot, Lisa had dug it out using needle-nose pliers and then cleaned the wound with alcohol. Greg screamed like a baby and thrashed around as if possessed. Nobody checked to see if he had a fever. Mostly he’d slept a lot. Then one day he got up, limped down for breakfast, and that was that.
Jack’s original plan was to dig in with the knife and try to lever the pellet out. Now he realized that was stupid. If he cut her more inside, the infection could spread. But he needed the pellet out, as well as anything it had carried inside.
After a quick check to see if she was still breathing—she was—he went upstairs and looked around. Desiccated bodies of a man and a woman lying in bed. Nothing new there, he barely spared them a glance. What he wanted wasn’t in the bedroom anyway.
The master bathroom had all the basic stuff: soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, brushes. It also had a double-sided mirror resting on a vanity. Each side had different magnifications. His mom used to sit in front of a mirror like that several times a week, plucking away at her face with tweezers. Whoever lived here must have also engaged in the curious practice, because this woman also had tweezers. Jack took them downstairs and disinfected them.
He couldn’t go probing the wound with all that pus in there. He needed to clean it, but the only thing he had was alcohol and a few gallons of dubious water.
So then boil it, dummy.
Jack cut a clean white sheet into strips, soaked the strips in a small pot, and then held the pot over the fire. Fairly quickly, he discovered he couldn’t hold the handle without burning his hand off. Undaunted, he cleared a space on the grate us
ing a poker and balanced it there. Several minutes later, when the pot started boiling, he lifted it out with an oven mitt and placed it on the table.
After squeezing out as much pus as he could, he cleaned the outside of the wound again with alcohol. Lisa didn’t move. Troubling, if she was so far gone she no longer noticed the sting.
Jack held a section of boiled sheet against the wound and used the tweezers to push it in. Lisa’s flesh resisted every effort to get it in more than about half an inch until he turned it like a drill. After that, he got it in about an inch, beyond which he didn’t feel comfortable pushing. When he retracted the cloth, it was dark red and slimy, and it smelled horrible.
Jack did the same procedure with a different section of sheet, and it went in easier. Lisa shifted a little each time, poke after poke, but didn’t wake up again. With each retraction, the cloth came out less dark, less slimy. Several passes later, the wound began bleeding a little. So long as it wasn’t too much, he thought that might be a good thing. Once he got that pellet out, the blood would carry out whatever bad stuff was in there.
It wasn’t easy. He disinfected the tweezers again and went probing—carefully, so as not to jab anything important, like a vein. Soon he felt a dull, hard resistance he didn’t think was bone.
Jack found it difficult to open the tweezers with Lisa’s flesh pressing from all sides. After five minutes of nudging and prying, his hands were shaking, and he was sweating easily as much as her.
He cleaned the wound again, this time without probing inside. He then bent the tweezers open, widening the gap so the tines would stay open when he released them inside. Another five minutes and he pulled out the pellet. She was bleeding way more now, but it wasn’t a gusher.
More cleaning around the outside, then he bandaged her with a clean strip of cloth. Even if he’d had a sewing kit, he still would have left the wound open, at least a little. They’d learned with Greg’s leg it would fill with fluid and have to be cut again to drain.
Tired as he felt, he had to do something about the fire, now smoldering and giving off less heat. He got up and began popping off cabinet doors. After adding more strips of rug, the sullen embers grew to a bright yellow blaze that quickly took the stained wood.
Jack was about to find a saw for the big dining table when he heard a noise from the kitchen. Terror seized him as he realized his stupidity. If he could find Lisa, someone could find him!
He ran back to the kitchen and pulled his pistol. Staring at the half-open door—so bright he couldn’t see—Jack raised it and prepared to fire.
“Don’t shoot!” Larry yelled. “It’s us!”
22
Jack and Olivia were standing near the fire with an eye out the window in case those kids suddenly showed up. She and Larry had spent the last two hours hiding in the woods and trying to pick up Jack’s trail.
Everyone agreed they couldn’t stay here. Not after Lisa, then Jack, then Larry and Olivia had found it so easily. To that end, Larry was hiking down the road looking for somewhere they could get to before nightfall.
Occasionally, Lisa would mumble incoherently in her troubled doze. Jack didn’t know whether to feel comforted by that or concerned.
“How long has she been here?” Olivia said.
He scratched his head in thought. “Hard to say. The fire was dead when I got here, so … maybe a week. Or maybe a day.”
“Could she get like this in a day?”
“I got the flu once,” he said. “Started throwing up one morning. After that, I was in bed all week. Couldn’t even walk to the bathroom without resting on the way. That happened in like ten hours.”
“But if the wound’s so tiny …”
Jack had told them how he’d dug out the pellet and cleaned the wound. He’d blushed through the explanation as to why Lisa was now wrapped in a blanket and not wearing her clothes. To their credit, neither friend smirked or said anything stupid.
When Jack asked about the firefight, they said they’d been rushed from both directions at once, forcing them to flee on foot. Clearly, they’d been seen, and word had spread by radio. Considering how quickly the attack came, Cassie’s gang had to be nearby. Which went along with what Lisa had said in her note back at the farm.
While Larry was out, Jack checked the cars in the garage that went with the two sets of keys he’d found on a hook. He hadn’t expected them to start, and they didn’t.
The group at Big Timber had learned a lot about cars over the last few months. A kid named Sammy was a real “gear head,” in his words. He’d gloomily claimed all gasoline would be worthless in another year. Diesel, he said, would last maybe five more. Jack quizzed him as to how he knew all this. The boy smiled mysteriously, loving the attention, but hadn’t elaborated. If he hadn’t been right about everything else car-related, Jack would have brushed it off. Now, gas was another worry on top of everything else. Who knew how to make gasoline?
All of this strengthened Jack’s resolve to move away from combustion engines to raising and riding horses. If not for Cassie and her stupid friends, he’d be working on that now instead of digging into his friend’s arm with a dead woman’s grooming supplies.
When Larry returned, his face was red from the weather, which had grown chilly again and windy.
“There’s a place down the road,” Larry said after a furtive glance at Lisa. “Maybe too far.”
“How close to the road?” Jack said.
“Pretty far back. If we start a fire, nobody’ll notice unless they get out and sniff right there.”
Olivia pointed out the window. “Jack!”
Jack turned and looked. Coming down the hill through the wet grass were what looked like fifteen teenagers.
Larry said, “Guess they found us,” and reached for his shotgun.
“I got this,” Jack said. “I put a wheelbarrow out front. For Lisa.”
“Noticed that,” Larry said.
“I’ll meet you in a minute.”
Not waiting to see if they listened, Jack grabbed his rifle and burst out the back door. He took aim at the closest kid, held his breath, and fired. A difficult shot at that range with a red dot scope, and the boy went down in two. Some of the kids scattered, some didn’t. The ones who remained raised mostly pistols and the odd rifle and fired back.
Jack ducked for cover under a hail of wood chips and broken glass, then took out a girl carrying a rifle in three quick blasts. The rest of the kids were openly fleeing back the way they’d come by this point. After reaching the tree line, they turned around and fired at the house. At that range and with those weapons, there was no way they could hit him except by luck, but so many kids firing at once didn’t need luck. All they needed was time and willingness, and they had plenty of both.
Jack joined the others out front and checked on Lisa, who lay in the wheelbarrow covered in blankets. He felt her head. Hot, but no worse than before, and her eyes were half open.
“You hit any?” Larry said.
“Yeah.”
“They coming?”
“Don’t know,” Jack said. “Now let’s go.”
With gunfire still sounding behind them, Larry pushed Lisa while Olivia and Jack guarded the rear. The house hid them from sight long enough for the hilly landscape to take over. After that, as Larry explained, it was a good mile through the once sparsely populated countryside. Here and there they saw houses with land but no crops or barns. Jack figured the people here had liked quiet, country living of the sort his parents had once longed for. Away from the city. His mom had wanted her very own garden, and his dad wanted a wood shop to make furniture.
“How much farther?” Jack said when it was his turn to push.
“Not much,” Larry said. “There’s a long driveway on the left somewhere ahead.”
“Okay.”
His hands were burning, and he feared any minute would bring a bunch of cars roaring their way. That’s what he would have done—had cars waiting to ambush them after they fl
ed the house.
He wondered how long it’d take Cassie’s gang to get back to their cars. The gunshots had ended about twenty minutes ago, but it took maybe ten to get through the woods to the road. Maybe they knew the area really well and maybe they didn’t.
“Shit,” Jack said, glancing behind him.
“What?” Olivia said.
“We need to hurry.”
“We are!” she said.
“We need to hurry faster.”
Gunfire sounded from down the road, behind them. A glance back showed nothing there—just empty road curving out of sight. They were probably shooting at the house again, this time from the other side.
“Right here,” Larry said, pointing at a driveway shrouded in low-hanging branches.
Jack rolled Lisa up the drive and didn’t slow until he lost sight of the road. A minute later, they pulled into a clearing with a single-story brick house with a truck and a car out front and a side garage.
Jack set the wheelbarrow down, tried the front door, and found it locked. He looked under the doormat and some nearby potted plants, all withered, and gasped in surprise when he discovered a brass key. Not believing his luck, he tried the lock … but the key didn’t fit. Which made no sense at all. Why would someone hide a key that didn’t fit?
“Let me try?” Larry said.
“It’s locked,” Jack said.
“Your hands are shaking,” Larry said.
Biting back a hasty retort, Jack handed him the key. So frustrating. He wanted Lisa comfortable and out of the cold. He plucked a decorative paver from the garden, prepared to bash in the window, and then Larry opened the door.
Larry seemed embarrassed. “Sorry, man.”
Jack dropped the brick. “Help me get her in.”
“I’ll start a fire,” Olivia said.
Jack and Larry carried Lisa inside and set her down on a comfortable looking couch. She’d started shivering again, but her eyes were open, and she was definitely awake.
“F-f-freezing,” Lisa said in a stronger voice than at the other place.
