Into the Outside: A POST APOCALYPTIC NOVEL

by Lynda Engler

  “Will she have other medicines?” asked Isabella, replacing the compress on his head.

  “Some, but mostly she has her hands. She can take away others pain an’ heal with her fingertips.”

  “You’re kidding, right? He needs real medicine, not some magic trick! Do you have a thermometer? He must be 105° by now,” said Isabella.

  “It’s not magic, but she can really help him. She feels the pain an’ takes it into her body. Just like our storyteller, Araddea, sends her spirit soaring an’ brings back tales from far away. Some of us can do things with our minds that others can’t. Heals-with-Hands cures the sick by putting her hands on them. I wish I could do that – the willow bark doesn’t seem to be helpin’ the boy much,” replied Violet solemnly.

  When the medicine woman arrived, Andra brought her to the small bedroom and without a word, the teenage girl knelt next to the bed, put both palms on Davin’s chest and closed her eyes. She began a chant, quietly at first but then it grew into a wail and finally a shout. “Oh, oh, oh, OH, OH OH, OOOWWWH!” Then silence. She sat back on her heals and opened her eyes.

  “I’ve done what I can. I need to rest now.” Heals-with-Hands’ voice was raspy with exhaustion.

  Violet walked the healer out of the room, supporting her by the elbow as if caring for an aged woman.

  The impotence Isabella felt at not being able to help Davin forced frustrated words from her lips. “That’s it?! That’s all she is going to do for him? Chant over his inert little body?”

  “Is he any better?” asked Andra.

  As Isabella felt Davin’s forehead, she realized that he was cooler. “He seems to be sleeping calmly now. Let’s let him rest.” Maybe the strange mystic healer had actually done some good. Or perhaps the willow bark aspirin earlier had finally kicked in.

  Isabella took Andra by the hand and walked the little girl out to the living room where they found Heals-with-Hands lying on the couch. She was a sea of purple and pink robes, clashing violently with the brown, taupe and rust colors of the antique plaid sofa. Pumpkin jumped on the medicine woman’s lap and began purring.

  “Will he get better now?” Isabella asked, still not convinced the strange girl had any healing skills at all.

  “I’m not sure. He’s very weak, but I took the fever from him. Let him sleep, give him lots of water when he wakes and come get me again if the fever returns. I’ll do what I can, but I can’t promise anything. The child is weak in more than illness,” answered the healer, sitting up slowly. The girl really did appear to be extremely tired, as if she had just run for miles or climbed a mountain.

  “What do you mean ‘in more than illness’?” asked Isabella staring at the medicine woman as if she had just pronounced a death sentence on the little boy.

  “Some children are just born weak and don’t survive. We can only watch and wait.” She took the cat from her lap, placed him in Andra’s arms and walked toward the door, obviously recuperated enough from her ordeal. “I’m sorry; sometimes that’s just the way it is. Give him willow bark every four hours and I’ll come by in the morning. Call for me if he gets worse.”

  Andra began to cry.

  Nineteen

  Luke had expected a trumpet blowing reveille but instead he was awakened by Nurse Lady unlocking his door. A small dog trailed at her feet. Ignoring the yapping animal, she grabbed his right arm and pulled it toward her. “Let me look at that test. Hum, it’s positive. Where were you exposed to TB?”

  Luke jumped out of bed. “TB? What are you talking about? What’s wrong with my arm?”

  “I took a tuberculosis test yesterday and your PPD is positive. You didn’t mention contact with anyone. Where were you exposed?”

  “I came across a mutant in the woods. She was coughing. Is this dangerous? Am I going to get sick?” Luke nervously paced the room, his bare feet silent on the linoleum floor. He looked at the nurse with expectant eyes.

  “Not now you won’t. You’ll need to take medication for the next three months, but you’ll be fine. You should be thankful for our advances in medicine. Before the wars, you’d have had to wait three days for the PPD to show signs and then take meds for six months.” Nurse Lady was actually smiling for once.

  “Oh, so my having to get shots for three months makes you happy? I don’t think I can stand that!” moaned Luke as he spun around and plopped on his bed, dejected. He deflated like someone had let all the air out of him, imagining a quarter of a year of torturous needles.

  “No shots, just pills, once a day. And for your information, young man, I don’t take pleasure in people’s pain. I’m a nurse. I do what I can to help and heal. I enjoy seeing people, even insufferable little boys like you, get healthy.”

  “Oh.” Luke was silent for a moment, staring at his feet. “I get it. Sorry.” He felt bad that he jumped to conclusions and accused the woman of wanting him to experience pain. He was embarrassed, and tried to change the subject as the woman just stood there silently. “What’s with the little dog? Is he yours?”

  Luke reached down to pet the animal. The puppy licked his fingers then wound through Luke’s legs like a cute little chubby, fuzzy snake.

  “We have animals in the breeding lab. It’s just one of many things we do at this facility. The animals outside mutated but we saved a few and we’re breeding them. This one’s mother died when he was born, so I bottle fed him and now he won’t leave my side. He usually stays in my quarters down the hall, but today he just wouldn’t stop barking, so I let him tag along.” She paused, then turned the conversation back to the reason she had come to see him. “I’ll give you a supply of INH2 to take back to your shelter, but you’ll need to stay here for the first week, in isolation, so you don’t infect your family. Since the disease isn’t active, you won’t spread it, but policy dictates quarantine. Stay put and I’ll get the pills from my office. You must take one each day – do I have to babysit or will you remember to do it?”

  “I’m not a baby.” He wondered if Isabella had caught it too. She had met the mutant girl as well. Maybe she didn’t spend as much time with her as he did. I shouldn’t have sat and talked with her! he thought.

  “Colonel Ericson said he’d give me a tour of Picatinny. Guess I can’t get that if I’m stuck here in this room.”

  Before leaving, Nurse Lady turned and said, “You’ll have to take that up with the Colonel. I’ll be right back with your medicine.” The door locked automatically behind her and the dog.

  * * *

  Davin’s fever returned the next morning so Oberon went to fetch the medicine woman. The boy was burning up, sweating and his skin was clammy.

  “That’s good, right? Sweat out a fever?” asked Isabella, hopefully. She twirled her hair absentmindedly as she stood at his bedside.

  “Maybe. Let’s wait and see what the medicine woman says,” replied Malcolm. He sat by the boy’s side in a stiff-backed wooden chair and held his little hand.

  Isabella wondered how old Heals-with-Hands was. She seemed a little older than her own sixteen years. But with the new humans, sixteen or seventeen was middle aged. Twenty was old. And if she looked in her late teens it meant, she was probably twenty-something. Old, for her people. Did the girl actually have any medical skills? And what about the weird ability to heal with her hands? Perhaps some mutations were mental rather than physical.

  The girl arrived with a basket of herbs and poultices. She placed a wash cloth soaked in some kind of herbal concoction on Davin’s forehead, but the boy tossed and turned and she had to reapply it several times.

  “This won’t do,” said Heals-with-Hands and placed her palms on the little boy’s pale skin. She closed her eyes and intoned the same chant she had used the day before. Within moments, Davin calmed down. Once he was quiet, she put the wash cloth back on his head. This time he let it stay there.

  “Do you want me to hold that?” asked Isabella.

  “Please. The mind healing makes me very tired but I’ll mix up another remedy
in the kitchen.” She allowed Isabella to take over Davin’s immediate care and left wearily with her basket. Walking was difficult for the girl after working her magic on the boy.

  Just then Pumpkin ran into the room, followed by Andra. “How is he?” she asked eagerly.

  Malcolm went to the little girl and picked her up into his arms. “Not so good. Let’s let Isabella and the medicine woman take care of him while we go outside. I’m sure Shia and the boys would like you to play with them in the yard.”

  “Mommy will be mad at me if he doesn’t get better. I promised I’d take care of him.” She struggled in his arms, trying to get down, but he held her firmly, yet gently for such a big man.

  “Andra, sometimes there just isn’t anything we can do. You can’t take care of him right now. Let the women handle it. Let’s go outside,” said Malcolm and carried the struggling little girl out of the room.

  Heals-with-Hands came back with a glass of greenish-colored tea. She sat in the empty bedside chair, sighing in exhaustion as she did. “Davin, sit up and drink this,” she directed.

  Isabella took the poultice off his head and sat the boy up, holding him upright while the medicine woman brought the glass to his lips. He drank a tiny sip and tried to lie down again. “Oh, no you don’t,” said Isabella. “Drink it all.”

  Davin drank a little more at Isabella’s urging and then said, “I want my mommy. Where’s Mommy?”

  “Shh, just drink now. You’ll see Mommy soon,” said the medicine woman. She was able to get him to take another sip before he fell back to sleep.

  “What’s in that anyway?” asked Isabella, twirling her hair in her fingers as she sat next to the sick little boy.

  “Fever reducer and a natural painkiller.”

  “Why did you promise him he’d see his mother soon? She might be dead by now, for all we know and even if she isn’t, he’s not likely to see her again before she dies,” whispered Isabella angrily.

  “Then he’ll see her in Paradise. He isn’t getting any better and I’m afraid, even with our best efforts, he might not survive.”

  * * *

  Nurse Lady came and went, as did his breakfast tray. What a great place, thought Luke. All the technology and comforts anyone could ask for and I’m stuck in this room!

  As he lay there feeling sorry for himself, the lock clicked and the door opened. The fluorescent light glinted off Colonel Ericson’s bald pate. “It seems you’ve picked up a bit of a bug, kid. But don’t worry, Nurse Anderson will make sure you’re healthy. In the meantime, do you want to see the base?” he asked with a smile.

  “But I thought I was quarantined? You’ll let me out of here? What if I infect everyone?”

  “I’m afraid you’re stuck in here for a week, but I can show you around virtually.” Colonel Ericson took a flat silver box from a black bag that hung on his shoulder and placed it on the table. “Take a seat.”

  Luke almost jumped out of the bed, clearing the short distance to the table in less than a blink of an eye.

  “Is that a computer?” asked Luke as the machine unfolded to reveal a picture screen on the thin vertical surface and alphabet keys that glowed almost magically on the glasslike horizontal surface.

  The Colonel laughed. “Yes, Luke. You don’t have anything like this in your shelter, do you?”

  “No,” he said, reaching out a tentative hand to stroke it longingly. “I’ve read about computers and seen pictures in books. I thought the technology was all gone. My grandparents never told me it was still out here. Granpapa would kill for a computer.”

  “I bet he would,” chuckled the soldier. “We lost a lot of data when the enemy set off the EMP. The electromagnetic pulse circled the world, rendering all technology temporarily inoperable and once we were finally able to reset the hardware, we realized that we had lost so much data, that bringing it all back would take time and skill we just didn’t have. But the military had bases all over the world – and much of it was shielded. Not everything was lost.

  “We were taken by surprise – a deadly mistake on our part. The U.S. government at that time had spent years dismantling our military and reducing funding for security – they were convinced the Terror Wars had been won. There hadn’t been any attacks for years and they thought they had stopped all the madmen and malcontents. But, as you know, they were wrong. They won – we lost. With our manufacturing base lost, it’s taken fifty years to get back to the point we’re at now.”

  “Couldn’t you just make new computers?” asked Luke.

  “That would have been nice, but microchip production isn’t something that happens easily without the proper tools, facilities and skilled people. Those were all lost. And there were higher priorities the first few decades after the attacks.”

  The computer made whirring noises and suddenly the screen filled with a military logo: “Picatinny Arsenal – Joint US Military Service: Research, Development and Deployment Center.” The Colonel began tapping keys and the screen changed showing pictures of the base, its history and its current status. Luke watched new images appear each time the Colonel tapped the screen. As he pushed pictures out of the way on the monitor, he used his index finger to drag new ones up from a row of small icons on the bottom of the screen. As Ericson pulled his index finger and thumb apart on each picture, it magically enlarged to fill the entire screen.

  Colonel Ericson summarized the images. “Before the Final War, Picatinny was the country’s most comprehensive armaments installation, a one-of-a-kind facility that provided virtually all of the lethal mechanisms used in America’s weapons systems. Today, the main section of the 6,500 acre facility is under a thick Plexiglas dome, allowing its interconnected laboratories, offices, shops and homes to be easily accessed by all base personnel, without exposure to the hazards of Outside.”

  “I had no idea it was so big,” said Luke. Then, remembering the loneliness and isolation of the shelter that had driven Isabella away, he asked, “Why do you leave the shelter families in their tiny enclaves when you could bring them all here and house them under the dome?”

  “You ever heard the expression, ‘Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket?’ It’s safer for humanity to be split up. I know you are somewhat cramped in your shelter, but you have everything you need. Believe me, it’s really better this way, Luke,” said Ericson. He got up from the desk and paced around the room, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Better for whom?” asked Luke. “You guys here have room to move around. You can go outside and walk on grass under the dome and actually see more than ten people at a time. The families stuck in holes in the ground can’t do that.”

  The Colonel raised one eyebrow. “It’s better for all of us, Luke. If a disease, or a disaster, were to strike any of our domed bases, or underground facilities, we could lose a substantial percentage of our population. The more split up humanity is, the better.” Clearly his area of expertise, he looked delighted to be instructing Luke in population security strategy.

  “Right,” replied Luke, but he wasn’t convinced. He thought it was all well and good for those who had a lot to be telling those who had so little that they were better off that way, for their own good.

  The old military man sniffed haughtily and stuck out a carrot for Luke. “You could live here, if you have aspirations of joining the military when you turn eighteen.”

  “You’re out of your mind!” About a lot of things, thought Luke.

  The Colonel laughed. “Just like your grandfather. But, if you’d like, you can come here to live. We always need support personnel, like medical staff, research personnel, maintenance teams and food service workers. How old are you anyway?”

  “Almost seventeen.” Then Luke’s face scrunched into deep concentration and he continued, “I’ll think about your offer. I really will. I always hoped to go to Mount Weather, but Picatinny is fascinating.”

  “And closer to home,” replied the Colonel. “Trust me, you won’t regret it.”

/>   “Colonel, if I can’t get out of quarantine, why are you in here with me? Won’t you catch TB?”

  “Not likely. You probably aren’t contagious anyway, it’s just a precaution. We all get monthly PPD tests, so if I or any of the search team contract it, we’ll simply take a course of INH2. Believe me, with the resurgence of TB in the mutant population in the last few years, we manufacture plenty of those little round pills.”

  “And you don’t give them to the mutants?”

  “Whatever for?”

  Twenty

  For two days, Davin’s body fought the fever. He drank a little but refused to eat. Most of the time he slept in fitful spurts, tossing and turning, often violently. But on the third day the fever broke on its own and he slept calmly. Isabella and Malcolm had taken turns nursing the sick little boy while also looking after Shia and Andra. They hardly saw each other, except when the two little girls were over at Milora and Guy’s new house.

  Milora and Guy and their son had settled into a small empty house on the far side of the lake, with Garith and Macy as their next door neighbors. Kaedo and his son Maxi chose a home on a side street further away from the lake. Clay moved into the large community house with the other young, unmarried “almost-adults” and Kalla chose a similar living arrangement with the older girls of the community. Everyone in Malcolm’s tribe seemed to be settling in at Telemark except Isabella and Malcolm.

  Isabella was beat and she knew Malcolm must be just as exhausted. They were both so happy when Davin finally seemed better and they could take a break and finally fall into a much needed slumber.

  When they woke, Isabella and Malcolm returned to Davin’s room. He appeared to be sleeping peacefully and Isabella put her hand on his forehead to check his temperature. “Malcolm, he’s cold!”