by James Axler
As she stood there, Krysty heard the usual gurgles and snuffles of the babies. It was kind of musical in its way.
She turned and walked down the aisle of cribs, careful to keep her movements quiet. There were nine in total, although only six were in use right now, arranged along the walls with their short ends sticking out to create a single aisle down the center. Though roughly the same size and design, the cribs didn’t match. They had been built by friends of the kindergarten, and one of them had yet to be painted. The six in use had mobiles hanging over them, simple things of stars and moons, birds and clouds, that spun in the lightest breeze.
Krysty looked at the mobiles, watching as they spun in her wake. She couldn’t resist peeking into one of the cribs—though it wasn’t as if there was some rule that said she shouldn’t, far from it in fact—she was here to check on the children and make sure they were okay.
Inside the crib was a baby, fast asleep and wrapped in a blue blanket, its thumb rammed in its mouth in a glistening smear of drool.
A boy, Krysty thought. He looked so sweet; it made her want to hold him.
Krysty moved over to the next crib. This one held a girl with a fuzz of blond hair on her head that stood up like a wave, a little stuffed doll lying in the crib with her. The girl was coughing a little in her sleep, a kind of hiccupping movement, her chest going up and down.
“It’s all right, sweetie,” Krysty whispered. “You’re safe here.”
The next crib and the next, Krysty checked them all. In the fifth crib she noticed something that struck her as off. She couldn’t really say why it struck her that way, but the little boy who lay there with his blanket draped over him looked like he was grimacing and maybe struggling to breathe. His snoring came in an irregular stutter, barely audible until Krysty leaned in close.
Though it was probably nothing, Krysty popped her head out of the nursery room and attracted Christine’s attention, gesturing for the older woman to come over.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know the babies’ names,” Krysty began. “I wonder if one of the boys looks all right to you.”
Christine walked quietly with Krysty and peered into the crib she had indicated. “Oh, that’s Geoffrey,” she whispered. “He looks a little knocked out, poor lamb.” She reached into the crib and, very gently, lifted him into her arms. “Feels floppy, too.”
“Is that normal?” Krysty whispered. “I don’t have much experience with babies.”
“I’ll take him outside and see if he perks up,” Christine said. “You stay here, Kryssie, and keep an eye on the others. He’ll be all right. You did the right thing.”
Krysty watched as Christine took the slowly stirring Geoffrey through the main room and out the back door that led to the fenced-in yard. The rain had eased up and there was just a little water on the ground now. Krysty strode over to the window and watched as her colleague held the boy in her arms and tried to rouse him. He was alive, that was obvious, but he didn’t seem to want to be roused. His head kept flopping away from Christine’s touch and he seemed to have little energy.
After a while, Christine came back inside still holding the little boy. “I think he’s all right,” she told Krysty as they laid him back in his crib. “Just tired. Doesn’t want to wake up.”
“Is that normal?” Krysty whispered.
Christine shrugged. “Some kids need more sleep than others,” she said. “We’ll keep an eye on him.”
Krysty did just that, and over the next few hours she made sure to drop in on the baby area even when Andrea was there. She also made a mental note to talk with Mildred about what she had seen.
Chapter Seventeen
The farmhands had been brought straight to the medical faculty tower after the incident with the bear. Mildred had attended to Sylvio, who had been in a state of shock but, other than a few scratches and bruises, had been unharmed.
Paul was a different matter. The guy had wrestled with that bear in a no-holds-barred match and had his face badly lacerated by a slash of those extending claws. He had been left in a bad way, holding the torn flesh of his face up where it should belong when he had arrived at the tower.
Petra and some of the other clinicians had swarmed on Paul, patching up his wounds and sedating him to keep him comfortable. Mildred had peeked in on that first day, but the guy had been sleeping and his wife and kids had arrived to hold vigil, which made her feel like she was intruding. Even from that little peek, however, Mildred had seen the awful wounds the farmer had sustained; the attack had left his face lopsided, as if his expression was trying to melt away the way wax will from a candle as it burns.
The next morning had been a busy one for Mildred, who was on a fast-track training program as she tried to memorize as much as she could about Heaven Falls’ medicine for her projected jaunt back out into the Deathlands. She hadn’t told anyone here about that yet, not even J.B. or the other companions, but it was something she kept mulling over each time she administered one of the honey-scented patches to a skin tear some carpenter or other had managed to snag during the routine construction of a new building.
It was close to the end of the day by the time Mildred checked on Ricky, and she decided she would drop in on Paul on the way there, while things were quiet. Paul’s room was similar to Ricky’s, a single bed raised high in its center with obscured lighting coming from the grillwork wall. A couple pieces of elegantly simple furniture and three chairs had been brought in for the family the afternoon before. The family wasn’t there now; it was just Paul lying alone in the bed, knocked out on sedatives.
“Paul?” Mildred whispered as she stood in the doorway. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
The man in the bed didn’t answer. He was just a silhouette with the light the way it was, and he didn’t move other than the way his chest rose and fell. He was asleep. Good for him, Mildred thought. He needed it after what had happened.
Curiosity made her walk into the room. She had come here out of curiosity, too, though she had maybe told herself that it was medical duty, care, something like that. But now... Well, now it was pure curiosity. A man had had his faced ripped off by a mutie bear and the local doctors had patched him back together using primitive balms and salves and maybe a little needle and thread. A person had to be curious how that was going to wind up looking; it was human nature.
Mildred stepped over to the bed, her footsteps quiet. She stopped in front of the bed and looked at the man who lay there. He had dark hair and the scrappy remains of a beard. The docs had probably shaved him when they had worked on his face, so only a few tufts remained dotted around the scars. He was a handsome man, or had been, Mildred could tell.
Now his face showed three thick scrapes across it, plunging from above his left eyebrow down to the inside corner of his left eye, across his nose and into his mouth. His nose looked crooked, white bars striped across it where the claws had snagged. And he looked sad, his mouth downturned, his eyes closed as if downcast.
Mildred looked, her dark eyes roving across that face, drinking in the wounds. The patient looked remarkably normal. The wounds were there, the left eyebrow now two separate tufts with nothing to connect them. But he looked normal.
Standing there in the half-lit room, Mildred thought back to how the man had looked on arrival. Was it really as bad as she had imagined? It was hard to second-guess a memory seen when emotions were running high, something barely glanced at before she had been called to work on the man’s colleague, Sylvio. Whatever she saw here and now, she knew it was a remarkable recovery. He was young and healthy; that could help with surgery. Maybe it had.
Mildred left the room, thinking about Paul as she made her way to see Ricky. The medical treatment here was effective and it was quickly employed. That had made a difference to the dark-haired farmhand. If she could bring this expertise to the field, out there in the Deathlands where people were dying every day, where it could genuinely do some good, well, that would be a goal worth pursuing.<
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Ricky was sitting on a chair next to his bed, eating a small bowl of dried apples that had been cut up like potato chips and glazed in honey. He looked a little pale, but otherwise in good health as Mildred walked in.
“Mildred, how are you?” Ricky asked.
“I should be asking you that.”
“Ah, I’m fine,” the lad said, crunching on another slice of apple. “Getting kinda bored, but the food’s good.”
“Yeah, the food’s good all over,” Mildred opined. “You want me to take a look at your wound?”
Ricky rolled his eyes. “Can’t wait! It’s the highlight of my day.”
“Mine, too,” Mildred said as she gestured for Ricky to remove his shirt.
“You want me to lie down?”
“No, you’re good,” Mildred told him as she crouched next to Ricky’s chair. With his chest revealed, Mildred could see the spot where the musket ball had struck him. The skin was unmarked and there was no sign of bruising. Gently, Mildred pressed her fingers against Ricky’s flank. “This hurt?”
“Nah,” Ricky said around a slice of glazed apple.
“How about when you breathe? Or when they got you out of bed?”
“I got myself out of bed,” Ricky told her. “And no, it didn’t hurt. Nothing hurts. Doesn’t even tickle anymore.”
“That’s good,” Mildred said, suddenly thoughtful. “You know, maybe it’s time we got you out of here, walking around.”
“I’d like that,” Ricky agreed, and he offered Mildred the half-empty bowl of apple cuts.
So together Ricky and Mildred left the room and paced up and down the clean corridors of the medical faculty, slow at first but speeding up as Ricky got his sea legs back.
“Anything hurting?” Mildred asked.
“Nada,” Ricky told her. “I feel like new. Or old. Whichever it was I was before that scalie clipped me.”
“Old,” Mildred said. “You want to go home?”
Ricky looked up at Mildred, surprise in his wide eyes. “Home?”
“Well, out of here at any rate,” Mildred said lightly. “I’m sure the Regina could allocate you a place to stay.”
“What’s the Regina?” Ricky asked.
“The baron of this place,” Mildred said.
“And she let you stay and use this doctoring stuff?”
“Gave me a job here,” Mildred told him. “Gave us all a job, as it happens.”
“J.B. isn’t a doctor,” Ricky said, “unless they needed a doctor of blasters.”
“Oh, yeah, he sure could do that,” Mildred agreed, laughing. “But, no, J.B.’s been working with a construction crew. Ryan, too, while Jak’s been helping out on a farm.”
“And Krysty? Doc?”
“They have stuff to do, too,” Mildred confirmed. “It’s all...organized.” It sounded strange to her to say that, as if it had only now struck her how easily they had fitted in. “They’ll find something for you to do, something you’ll enjoy.”
“Then we’re staying here?” Ricky asked. “Long-term?” He was concerned that he would have to give up searching for his sister, kidnapped by pirates from their hometown on Monster Island.
Mildred shrugged. She didn’t know. “Let’s see how we go about getting you discharged, and maybe you can stay with J.B. and me for a while, just so I can keep an eye on you, make sure you heal right.”
“Sounds good to me, Mildred,” Ricky agreed.
Judging by the way he had recovered, Mildred wouldn’t need to keep an eye on Ricky very long.
* * *
WHEN HE WASN’T on shift, J.B. took to walking the limits of the ville. The fields and housing gave way to trees that, in turn, hit the cavernous sides of the mountains to either side the farther he walked.
J.B. had heard about the bear attack from Mildred, though neither he nor Mildred had spoken to Jak about it. Their albino ally had all but disappeared, burying himself in his new life here and spending no time with his old companions. Even Doc had remarked that the lad had stopped returning home at night, and he suspected that Jak had found himself a woman with whom he shared a bed.
J.B. took some time scouring the fields with a set of miniature binoculars given to him by the owner of the Library Lounge, a place in a ville they’d recently visited. He’d got into the habit of carrying his satchel with him, even though it was no longer weighed down with spare ammo and detonators. He found Jak working one of the fields at the very edge of the settlement, where the trees still threatened to encroach. The albino was clearing the wilderness using a great scythe. It was backbreaking work, but necessary if the community of Heaven Falls was expected to expand.
There were two other men working in the field, clearing dead shrubbery and pulling up bindweed and creepers whose roots were buried deep. One of the men had a ponytail of hair and he walked with a limp, as though he was recovering from a fall.
“Hey, Jak,” J.B. called as the albino worked the scythe through a clump of weeds. “How are things?”
Looking up, Jak nodded, his ruby eyes fixed on J.B.’s. “’Kay.”
“Tough work that.” J.B. indicated the scythe. “You must be tired. Why don’t you take a break?”
Jak looked at J.B. and cut once more with the scythe. “No break,” he said.
Stepping closer, J.B. spoke to Jak in a low voice, watching the other farmhands working the soil. “Look, Jak, I’m worried about some stuff I see here. I wanted to discuss things, make sure you’re all right. Think you can take five minutes out for an old friend?”
Jak looked at him, his eyes narrowed. “Worried?”
“Yeah.” J.B. nodded. “Five minutes, what do you say?”
Jak called over to his fellow workers and explained in his curt manner that he was taking his break early. The others okayed that, but told him not to stray far.
“What happen?” Jak asked as he and the Armorer walked close to the tree line.
“Nothing’s happened,” J.B. said. “Not yet anyway. Doc said you’d disappeared off the map and we were wondering where you got to. We haven’t seen you around.”
“New bed,” Jak said, smiling.
“New bedmate?” J.B. asked. “Not that it’s any of my business.”
Jak shrugged. It didn’t matter to him who knew his business. “Girl. Melissa. Name Charm. Nice to me.”
“That’s fine,” J.B. said. “You want to tell me where you’re staying in case we need you?”
Jak explained the location of Charm’s lodge. It was over in the east of the settlement, on the other side to where J.B., Ryan and Doc had their cabins. J.B. figured he could find it if it came to it.
“Worried?” Jak prompted as they peered at the massing green at the edge of the fields.
J.B. nodded. “We’re splitting up. We mebbe don’t mean to, but it’s happening all the same. And every time we got split apart before it led to bad things happening. To you most of all.”
“Safe here,” Jak told him, and he meant it.
“Yeah, that’s what everyone tells me,” J.B. said. “Safe, just like a prison cell.”
Jak shook J.B.’s hand, reminding him that they were still friends, no matter what was happening here. Then he went back to the field, where he would put in another three hours of backbreaking work before sundown. J.B. watched him go before turning back to the wilderness and trekking some way into the strip of forest.
The trees were dense, and there were a few critters living here, little mammals, the kind that he and the companions had lived on before now, when food had been scarce. That was one change that he appreciated here: food was plentiful.
The ground began to slope upward and before long J.B. was having to use the tree limbs to help steady himself and literally pull himself up. After a while he gave up. It was just as he had thought—the mountains were too steep to climb without gear, which meant no one was coming down, either. Secure. But as he had told Jak, that sec reminded him of a prison.
J.B. turned back and made his w
ay across the settlement in the opposite direction until he came to a similar line of wilderness that stretched up into the mountains. He tried again to climb, but found it was almost as steep as the westerly edge, leaving him boxed in on two sides.
The south side was less overgrown, but a small fence had been erected there that marked the end of Heaven Falls. The fence was constructed of wooden slats and stood a little more than waist height. It took little effort for J.B. to scramble over it and drop down on the other side. Beyond was a border of scrubby grass and a few bushes, and twenty feet beyond that was a crack in the earth that was wide enough to drive a wag through. The far side of the crack was a lot lower, the depth of a couple of the shacks that J.B. had been building, stacked floor to roof. The gap looked natural and it ran the whole way around the ville until it met with the steep mountain slopes. J.B. didn’t know if it had always been there or was something recent, something caused perhaps by an earth-shaker missile dropped here during the nukecaust. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that here was another escape route blocked off, leaving only the front gates as a viable path from the ville, or perhaps that tough climb to the east.
“Come on, Doc,” J.B. muttered as he made his way back to the low fence. “I’m relying on you here.”
Doc was his out, his chance to take another look at the redoubt. Other options were dwindling as he investigated them, and J.B.’s mental checklist was getting shorter and shorter.
Chapter Eighteen
Charm had prepared the evening meal. Jak liked that. He could pull his weight, knew how to skin a rabbit and how to cook one, but he liked that she took care of him and had a meal ready when he came in from the field. The smell of herbs mixing in the pot was enough to make him smile as he walked into the shack they now shared.
Charm had not been working this day. The Melissas were rotated three days on and one day off, and this was her day off, though she cooked for him other times, too. He found her sitting on the back porch with the kitchen door open so she could hear if anything boiled over. The porch looked out over fields and the side of a mountain. It was a simple view, nothing special about it, but it looked good in the sunset.
