“Sorry, Luce,” Terri said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You got me good,” she said, laughing.
But Terri, normally possessed of a cheery disposition, did not join in the chuckle. Her face was tight and severe. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“Something wrong?”
“Two new patients overnight,” she said, her voice shaky. “Fever, chills, dry cough.”
Lucy tensed up.
“You think it’s corona?”
Terri was a good diagnostician, and if she suspected the virus that caused Covid-19, the bizarre respiratory virus that swept the globe nearly a decade ago, then that was probably what it was. She’d worked for a long-term care community in the old days and had absorbed a fair amount of medical knowledge from the experience. Strangely, the pandemic, which had killed around three million people worldwide before being wrestled under control like an angry steer, sometimes felt more frightening than the Pulse and its aftermath, which had killed many times that. Something about an invisible killer like a virus had messed with your mind in a way that even their civilization-ending blackout did not.
The prospect of disease loomed large in their community. Any outbreak was potentially disastrous, especially since the Pulse had boomeranged them all into a new Stone Age. Although she was not a medical doctor by training, she was an experienced registered nurse, and well, there were no physicians in their community. The census four months earlier had put the population of their community at one hundred and ninety souls. Just bad luck. She kept hoping a licensed physician would show up at their gates, but so far, that hadn’t happened.
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t want it to be.”
“But you think it is.”
“Yeah.”
“Masks?”
“Took care of it.”
“Good,” Lucy said. “Let’s go take a look.”
Terri waited on the porch while Lucy went inside to change. She was anxious to get to the clinic and check on the new patients. It had been a while since the last outbreak; two years earlier, cholera had claimed five lives. A bubble of anxiety pushed against her sternum. Anxiety had become a new friend these past few years.
Before exiting the bedroom, Lucy dry swallowed a Xanax tablet. She would just as soon go without the medication, but anxiety negatively affected her ability to focus on her work. She had developed a dependency on the pills, she was sorry to say, but the good news was that all controlled medication was in very short supply, and she had no choice but to ration the tablets she had.
“How high are the fevers?” asked Lucy.
“One-oh-one, one-oh-two, in that range.”
Lucy chewed on that bit of information as they finished the walk to the clinic in silence. If it was coronavirus, it was hard to say where it had come from. Folks were free to come and go as they pleased and frequently intermingled with other communities, especially at the various market days where they bartered for supplies they needed. Outbreaks cropped up from time to time. The wildly contagious pathogen was always out there, looking to buy its way back into the game.
The trip to the clinic wound through a copse of trees. A wooden bridge spanned the narrow creek, which was running low today. Trees were still barren as they edged toward the end of winter.
They called their community Promise.
Promise sat upon five hundred square acres, the former home of a Boy Scout camp, along the James River in Goochland County, Virginia, about twenty miles west of the former capital city, Richmond. At its center sat Lake Dillon, which provided much of the community’s freshwater supply. To the south, about a mile as the crow flew, the James River snaked lazily toward the city of Richmond.
Lucy and her brother Jack had moved here a year after the Pulse. They had never intended to abandon the farm that had been in their family for four generations, but circumstances had left them no choice. Things had deteriorated much more quickly than either of them had anticipated, and neither of them had been all that optimistic to begin with. Their reserves were deep, but in the urban areas, food and medicine ran dry in less than two weeks. Water lasted a bit longer, as municipal systems relied more on gravity to deliver it from the reservoirs. But with so much demand for water, the supply ran out about a month into the crisis and without power, there was no way to replenish it.
The incident was still burned in Lucy’s brain. It happened about two weeks after returning home from her harrowing rescue of Norah and subsequent escape from a dangerous criminal named Simon. It had been a pleasant morning, low humidity, the skies a fierce blue, and they were taking their breakfast on the country porch of the farmhouse she, Norah, and Jack shared.
They were hungry, desperate, a middle-aged couple from the suburbs.
Norah had spotted them first, skulking about the growing fields.
“Hey, someone’s out there,” she said, gesturing toward the window overlooking the crops.
A thin, bedraggled woman was pulling baby potatoes right out of the ground, alternating between shoving them into a backpack and into her mouth. Her partner, a middle-aged man wearing dirty khaki shorts and a grimy T-shirt, was filling a plastic grocery bag with them.
They’d heard about scavengers from their neighbors, but this was their first experience with one. Lucy and Jack had already considered the prospect and had decided to take on newcomers into their homestead. More bodies meant more hands to work the fields. These two could help them scale their growing and farming operations, make sure they had enough to get through the coming fall and winter.
“Let’s go talk to them,” Lucy had said. “They look nice enough.”
“These two?” Jack asked.
“We have to start somewhere,” Lucy said. “Strength in numbers, right?”
Jack let out a frustrated sigh.
“I guess.”
Armed with sidearms, Lucy and Jack had gone out the back, only to be greeted by a hail of gunfire. A round nicked Jack in the arm; Lucy dove off the porch and took cover at its base. Her enraged brother followed her. A quick check of his arm revealed the good news; the bullet had grazed him. Another inch to the left and it could have hit an artery. Their assailants were unskilled and stayed in the open, wildly discharging their weapons. Still taking cover behind the brick porch, Jack drew a bead on each of them, muttering under his breath about their stupidity, and then killed each of them with a shot to their chests.
That afternoon, she and Jack had buried the bodies in a remote tract of land at the edge of their property. In death, the couple looked painfully normal. Just a couple from the suburbs. But there were signs of other things frozen in their dead faces. Hunger. Desperation. Terror. The things that had brought them to Lucy’s doorstep that morning.
That night, after Norah was asleep, she and Jack had sat on the porch, discussing the implications of the day’s events.
Abandoning the farm was not an option.
“We have to defend this place,” Lucy had said.
Her mind was on Norah, the girl Lucy had rescued in Washington, D.C., on the day of the Pulse, the day the world had changed forever, and keeping her safe. A farm like theirs was a critical step in achieving that mission.
“We’ll be fine,” Jack had said.
“Those two could’ve killed us,” she said.
“They didn’t.”
“But they could have.”
“But they didn’t.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“I know,” he said, sighing. “We’ll have to be more careful. I’ll start working on more fencing.”
She suggested allying with their neighbors, forming a collective. Jack was opposed to the idea; in fact, he abhorred it.
And she wasn’t sure he would ever have come around if it hadn’t been for that one night in October.
“Who else is inpatient?” Lucy asked as they drew close to the clinic.
“Sammy Boston and Frances Statler.”
Bosto
n was in end-stage kidney failure; all they could do was keep him comfortable. Frances was recovering from a badly broken leg she’d suffered when her horse had thrown her.
“Nothing we can do for Boston,” Lucy said. “We’ll move Frances to the isolation tent.”
Thick cloud cover had settled over the area by the time they reached the clinic. This was not unwelcome news; bad weather would keep people indoors and limit the spread of the pathogen.
The clinic made its home in a small health lodge. There really wasn’t much to it — a six-bed patient ward and her small office where she stored rudimentary patient records. After moving Frances to the isolation tent, they’d have three beds for additional coronavirus cases. She hoped they wouldn’t need more.
After masking and gowning up, they made their way to the patient ward. Lucy herself had contracted coronavirus during the pandemic, but she wasn’t certain if she still carried any immune response to stave off another infection.
Lucy’s first patient was a wiry, middle-aged woman named Natalie. Lucy did not know her well. She made soap and candles, two of Promise’s biggest trading commodities. She was coughing and wore the bright shine of fever.
“Good morning, Natalie.” She nodded. Her breathing was labored, and it took a minute for her to find the wind to respond.
“Started feeling sick during the night,” Natalie replied before pausing to draw a slow breath. The simple reply took a lot out of her. “I didn’t want to take any chances exposing anyone else.
Terri handed Lucy a thermometer; she placed the metal tip under Natalie’s tongue. Two minutes later, Lucy had her answer. The woman’s fever had spiked to a hundred and four. If she had been sick for two days, she was likely contagious for several days before that. She had a potential outbreak on her hands. They needed to start tracing Natalie’s contacts immediately.
She made a few notes in her chart and directed Terri to give her Tylenol to control the fever. The story was the same with the other patient. High fever, coughing, shortness of breath. Classic symptoms of Covid-19. Both patients provided their contacts over the past ten days as best they could remember. Tracing the contacts was a key step in preventing a larger outbreak. The problem was that without testing, there was no way to know if, in fact, this was Covid. A number of respiratory diseases presented in similar fashion.
Lucy and Terri spent the rest of the morning interviewing the patients and establishing their contacts over the past week. Then they checked the pharmacy; they were extremely low on the antiviral medication that had was proven to treat Covid-19. It wasn’t a silver bullet, but it did reduce mortality significantly. As she eyed the empty cupboard, she made a clicking sound with her tongue.
“We’re going to have to make a trip to the Falls,” she said.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
The Falls was Promise’s chief ally along this section of the James River watershed. It drew its name from a small waterfall near a short jog in the river that served as the community’s centerpiece and fresh water source. It was an odd place led by a perplexing former nun named Julianne; its population was exclusively female. No men were allowed. But the two communities had co-existed peacefully for years.
Despite the fifteen-mile gap between them, the communities traded frequently. The Falls produced paper products, clothing, and, in addition to its stockpile of pharmaceuticals, had developed an expertise in producing herbal medication; in exchange, Promise provided produce and dairy to the Falls. A year ago, they had signed a mutual defense agreement. An attack on one community would be viewed as an attack on both.
It was about a three-hour ride on horseback; she would need to leave shortly in order to return by dark. Lucy was already working on her preflight checklist, as it were, all the boxes she would need to check off to ensure safe passage to and from the Falls. She didn’t like the idea of leaving the patients, but given that they’d be trading for medication, she needed to see their offerings with her own eyes.
“You start tracking the contacts,” Lucy said, making notes in each of the charts. “Tell everyone to mask up. No exceptions. Don’t give the oxygen unless you have no choice. If it’s Covid, we’re gonna need to make it last until we get back.”
Lucy left Terri to begin contact tracing and made her way to Jack’s tent. He eschewed living in the communal quarters in favor of a solitary existence on the fringes of the campground. No one gave him grief about it; he worked harder and longer than virtually anyone and was left to his own devices. If he wanted to sleep in the multiple personality disorder that was the central Virginia climate, which swung wildly between extreme winter cold and oppressive summer heat, spiced with as many tropical storms as snowstorms, he was free to do so.
His tent, a big six-person job, was empty, so she rerouted north toward the large maintenance shed where Jack spent his free time dithering with some electronic component or another. Even all this time after the world’s electricity had gone out, Jack remained convinced they could jerry rig their way around the devastating effects of the Pulse. The rain picked up as she jogged, the precipitation dully spattering the green nylon shell of her rain parka. On a drizzly Sunday morning, there was little activity. Smoke curled from most of the lodges’ chimneys. People would be hunkered down in their cottages, lying in bed, sitting around the blazing hearths, drinking their bitter coffee.
She found Jack sitting under the overhang, smoking a cigarette.
“Where we headed?” he asked when she had drawn within earshot of his position. His voice was thick and gravelly from years of smoking. She kept pushing him to quit, but he never would. She didn’t bother anymore. He was well aware of the risks; he didn’t particularly expect to live long enough to develop lung cancer.
“How’d you know?”
“The look on your face,” he replied.
“The Falls,” she said. “We need meds. Possible Covid outbreak.”
He pitched the half-smoked cigarette to the ground, where a droplet of rain extinguished it with a hiss.
“Let’s get moving then.”
2
The journey to the Falls cut southeast through green Virginia countryside, running largely parallel to the river, curling north, before bending southeast to the James again. Lucy sat astride Pancake, a twelve-year-old American quarter horse that she adored. He was fourteen hands high, his coat a deep, burnished copper. He was a bit skittish around men, perhaps the byproduct of an abusive former handler. Lucy took the point while Jack brought up the rear aboard another quarter horse, this one named Egg Drop. Despite the rain, they were making good time; they would be at the Falls within the hour.
They rode in silence until the road narrowed, harkening their final approach to the Falls. The horses’ hooves clocked softly on the pavement, damp and overrun with weeds. The road was still in decent shape, but she didn’t know for how much longer. Each cycle of the seasons brought extreme heat and bitter cold, swelling and shrinking the asphalt until it began to ripple and crack.
Lucy was cold and tired. She hoped Sister Julienne was in a decent mood; it lubricated the gears of commerce between the two communities. She needed as much of the medication as Julienne was willing to barter. They had brought prime goods to trade; their saddlebags were heavy with meats, eggs, and cheese. It would be an expensive day, but she was willing to pay. If it was coronavirus, and it caught hold in the general population, they had a rough month ahead of them. It wasn’t particularly deadly, killing about one out of every two hundred people it infected, but it could put dozens on ice as they recovered from the nasty respiratory illness.
Jack pulled up next to her as they made the final turn for the entrance to the Falls. Ahead, about a hundred yards distant, a sentinel stood guard before two sawhorses blocking the road. The blockades were largely symbolic, telling bandits and highwaymen that this community would be more trouble than it was worth. The same reason having a dog had been the best defense against burglars. You hear a dog barking, you’re probably gonna m
osey on to the next house.
“Can you behave yourself this time?” she asked.
Jack loved flirting with Sister Julienne, much to the conservative woman’s chagrin. Lucy got the impression that the woman enjoyed and abhorred his attention. The Falls sat on the campus of a defunct wilderness school for troubled teens, a sister school to the Catholic school where Julienne had taught. Julienne had come here after the Pulse, evacuating the city with several coworkers in the aftermath of the disaster. There wasn’t much to the ten-acre campus, a few buildings dotting the property. The wilderness beyond it, however, was vast and full of game.
“Do I have to?” he said with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye.
She sighed.
“If she’s in the mood, fine,” Lucy said. “If she’s in one of her moods, back off. We need these meds.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
Lucy didn’t push it; there wasn’t much point. If he wanted to behave, he would. If not, then she would have to deal with the fallout. It was just the way her brother was, and these long years since the Pulse hadn’t softened him at all.
He did have a soft spot for Norah. Norah visited him often at his tent, where they played chess, a game he had taught her; she had taken to the game quickly and won as many as she lost. She had helped fill the void in his life carved out by the passing of his niece, Lucy’s daughter, Emma.
They donned their facemasks. If they came in looking for antiviral without them, they were likely to be shown the door in due haste. Lucy recognized the guard, a lean young woman named Vikki Kelner. It was a good omen. She was friendly and enjoyed the alliance with Promise; she often represented the Falls at the Market, a monthly swap meet that drew a dozen communities to trade goods, services, and gossip.
American Midnight | Book 2 | Nightfall Page 2
