64
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
The carriage driver talked too much as he carried on about a million unimportant things I could not bother myself with: his dead sons, his long-lost wife, the state of things in Kentucky, his run-ins with bandits and thieves, his aching hip, his self-diagnosed throat cancer which gave him a voice as rough as an un-oiled engine—all I could think about was Atticus. His wounds were not life-threatening insofar as I could tell, but they needed to be cleaned and stitched and cleaned again or else the infection would become life-threatening. I shook my head thinking to myself how I’d warned him about this a long time ago, before we’d found the cabin. But it wasn’t his fault he was wounded now. I just wished it was as minor as it had been before. These wounds were deep, and he’d already bled a lot before I’d tied them off with pieces of my skirt. He was alive, and he wasn’t feverish yet, so that gave me some relief.
But why was he not waking up?
Atticus going in and out of consciousness worried me the most. How much blood had he lost? Concussion? His face had been beaten badly—severe head injury? It could be several things, and all of them I knew there wasn’t anything I could do for. But he could’ve been just exhausted, too. I hoped that was all it was.
“Do you know where I can get medical supplies?” I asked the man, knowing it was a longshot.
“Nah,” the man answered, glancing back at me. “No such thing. Not way out here anyway. Now in the Big Cities, you can find just about anything. Of course, you’d fare better without it than risk going to the Big Cities. Nothing but madness in there. You know I always knew this’d be how things turned out if the world ever ended in my lifetime. I used to tell my…”
I let his words fade on the warm night air.
I laid down beside Atticus, as closely as I could without touching the visible injuries, and careful about the ones I could not see. And as I lay there on my side watching him, stroking his forehead with my fingers, I fought the urge to cry like I always did.
“I’m going to take care of you,” I whispered. “I’m not going to let you die—God won’t let you die; He needs you here as much as I do”—I traced his eyebrow with my fingertip—“You’re going to be all right. You have to be…you have to be…” I swallowed, and sniffled back the sting in my sinuses, and then lay my head beside his bare arm and watched the stars move across the sky as we traveled beneath it.
I fought sleep, but sleep won.
The popping of gravel beneath the wheels of the utility trailer as it veered off the smooth road and went into the woods woke me in the morning. And it woke Atticus—he moaned through the pain, and tried to reposition himself on the wooden trailer floor but could barely move, and the tires going over rough, uneven surface made the whole thing shake and jolt, sending shockwaves of pain through Atticus’ body.
“Ahh! Damn…” he called out, his face contorted.
“Stop the horse!” I told the driver; I sat up beside Atticus—relieved he hadn’t fallen into a coma while he slept—and tried to hold his hand, but he winced and grunted when I touched his fingers.
I jerked my hand away and looked down at his; his middle and index fingers were swollen like sausages, and I was sure they were broken. Why didn’t I notice that before?
In the daylight, I saw the extent of his injuries: red-black bruising went around his right elbow and traveled up his arm—dislocated elbow, I was sure of that too, judging the awkward angle. There were three stab wounds—left arm, right thigh, right hip—and although they were deep, the blade had only cut through flesh, leaving veins and arteries untouched; he would have bled a lot more, and already be dead by now if otherwise, I assumed. On one side of his face he didn’t look like Atticus: his left eye was swollen shut, discolored by bruising and blood blisters. His lips were twice as big as they were supposed to be, and blood continuously trickled from the bottom lip where the split flesh was stretched too tightly by the bruising to close properly; every movement he made with his mouth just split it further.
And there was blood in the white of his right eye, I saw when he pried it open and looked up at me.
“Stop the horse!” I shouted once more.
The driver looked back. “All right, all right,” he said, and pulled on the reins. “This is about where you get off anyway.”
The horse came to a stop, and I stooped next to Atticus to help him up.
“I’ll…ve…fine,” he said, his voice muffled, his words altered by his swollen lips.
“Oh, don’t be so manly,” I scolded him, positioned one arm at his back. “Now you have to get up; it’s going to be painful, but you have to walk.”
“Ivcanvalk,” he insisted.
He was coherent, and talking, and that was a good sign—his head injury likely was not as serious as I’d feared.
With terrible effort, the driver and I helped Atticus down from the trailer. He was standing up better than I thought he could, but I had to wonder how much of it was forced and only making his injuries worse. We helped him over to sit with his back against a tree.
“Do you know anything about a raft nearby?” I asked the driver.
He pointed. “If it’s where it’s supposed to be, it’s usually under some brush just over that way, close to the riverbank. Keep in mind, crazy people always watching the river. My advice is stay close to the bank and don’t float off on any creeks. They’ll look invintin’ and all that, being off the big river, but trust me it’s dangerous down them creeks. After that I don’t know what to tell you. Where are you goin’ anyway?”
“Thank you for your help,” I told the man, and left him standing there.
As I helped Atticus to his feet again with his arm over my shoulder, the driver got back on his horse; I heard the familiar tap of his boots against the horse’s sides, and the click-click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Let’s go!” he called out to the horse; the trotting of hooves and the crunching of the trailer wheels on the gravel faded as they got farther away, leaving only the sounds of the behemoth Mississippi River nearby. I could see the brownish water through the trees, I could feel the openness beyond them, the vast space between both sides of the river where there were no trees to break the wind that had picked up the moment I stepped off the trailer. The sky was getting darker in the early morning as thick clouds moved in from the west; the smell of rain lingered on the air; low rumbles of thunder kneaded the clouds in the distance.
I contemplated the driver’s warnings about the Mississippi, and although I was sure Atticus would still want to take the raft if we found it, I decided that until the rain passed we would stay on land.
I gazed eastward behind me, opposite the river, and spotted a few small buildings just over a hill. With my support, Atticus made the three-minute walk in ten.
“We’ll stay here until the rain passes,” I said.
Atticus nodded weakly.
I peered into the glass windows of an abandoned beauty salon to see it was empty. And when we ventured inside, the smell of water damage and the must of abandonment was heavy in the room; the floor was covered in sand and muck pushed against the walls, beds of leaves filled with trash had settled in the corners, and there was a dark film on the tall windows and dingy walls that stopped just beneath the doorknob, all signs that the river had overflowed its banks and flooded this place at least once, but probably numerous times.
I helped Atticus through the room and led him to an oversized leather chair where women used to relax as they received pedicures and read magazines and gossiped. He sat into the chair heavily, grimacing with his eyes shut tight as he adjusted his body against the pain.
“What hurts the most?” I asked.
Atticus tried to lift his arm, indicating the dislocated elbow, but the pain was too great.
“You’v’hav to seth’it,” he tried to explain, and then pointed with the opposite hand.
“I…think I can do it,” I said, saving him from having to speak. “But I’m afraid. Reading about how to do these things is not the same as doing them. I’ve never had to reset an elbow before—I’ve never had to reset anything before.”
“You can’thoo’it.” (I trusted her, but I didn’t look forward to the process—whether she could do it or not, it would hurt like hell.)
I braced myself—so did Atticus—and positioned both hands around his arm; a second later and the elbow was set back into place. Atticus threw his head against the faux leather chair and screwed his eyes shut. (Ahh! I tried to focus only on breathing as a burning sensation worked its way mercilessly through my arm and shoulder—I nearly passed out.)
I made him a sling from a beautician’s smock I’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the restroom door. “You need to keep it still,” I told him, hoping my medical knowledge was accurate, or at the very least, not going to make him worse.
I took his hand into both of mine and examined the broken fingers. “No, just relax,” I told him when he tried to lift his head from the headrest. “I’m going to make a splint.” I looked around the place. “And I’ll need to find something to clean and stitch the stab wounds with.” I didn’t want to say it out loud, but I had no confidence in ever finding the latter. Improvisation would be my only option in treating him. But Atticus wasn’t a fishing hook fashioned from a soda can tab, or a—I spotted something while worrying.
“These will work for splints, at least,” I said, walking over to a table beside a tall mirror. I plucked four small wooden spatulas from a glass vase probably used to mix hair dye. In a cabinet above the sink, I found an unused roll of black electrical tape shoved behind an empty box.
I took the items and made splints for Atticus’ broken fingers. I saved the stab wounds for last because I saw nothing in the beauty salon that would help treat them. I needed antiseptic, and clean water, and, most important, antibiotics. I searched in every corner, every drawer; I went into the utility closet and turned it upside-down, hoping to find something, anything, but this place had been picked clean long ago, and all I came across were more smocks and a few brightly-colored hair clamps and some old bottles of dried-up nail polish. Oh! A bottle of rubbing alcohol! I felt my face light up when I saw it behind a small waste basket. But my hope came crashing down when I felt the emptiness of the plastic bottle in my hand. I chucked it into the waste basket right along with my short-lived excitement.
“Atticus,” I began, as I emerged from the utility closet, but he was asleep again.
I wanted to move him so he could lay down flat, rather than sitting slouched in the chair, but there was nowhere flat to move him to, except for the floor, and I was trying to prevent his open wounds from getting infected, not the other way around.
Leaving Atticus to get rest, I slipped out the front door of the beauty salon, set on searching the other buildings nearby.
I went into what was once an insurance office, searched it from corner to corner, but found nothing of immediate use, just stacks of printer paper and shelves and filing cabinets chock full of files, and old computers and printers that no longer worked. The building next to the insurance company used to be a second-hand clothing store, but the only clothes left inside were for infants. I thought about the world when The Fever struck, and my heart became heavy: children and the elderly were the most susceptible and died in greater numbers.
I went across the street to an old ice cream shop, but had no luck there, either; the laundromat and the pizza parlor and the Oriental rug store and the bakery—nothing, not even a stack of napkins I could’ve used to keep his wounds clean once I managed to find something to treat them with. If I ever did. But I knew I wouldn’t.
Still, I pressed on, moving through every small building on the street, tossing junk, pocketing potentials—a pair of scissors, a plastic grocery store bag, a child’s sand bucket—and hoping my refusal to give up would reward me with…I stopped cold, surrounded by broken ten-gallon fish tanks and torn bags of colorful rocks scattered about the floor; my eyes grew wide with shock. “I’m seeing things,” I said to myself, unable to tear my eyes away. Yet unable to move any closer, either. “No—if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
I was afraid to bend over and pick up the white plastic bottle, because once I did, and it proved empty, the hope and excitement of the moment would all come crashing down into a pile of lies.
I paused, looking away from the lonely bottle on the floor beckoning me, to take in my surroundings, to hope for a few seconds longer. Shelves were still miraculously stocked with items covered in dust and cobwebs: miniature castles and brightly-colored trees and tiny rock tunnels and artificial coral and intricately-carved pirate ships. Stacked high against the back wall were pet crates of all sizes, cat scratching posts made of wood and carpet. To my right, across from the aquarium section, dozens of collars and leashes still hung from a rack, color-coded, as if they’d never been touched since before society fell—who needed such things anymore when pets were now a food source in the New World?
There wasn’t even a hint of pet food left in the store, not even a dog bone. The pet shampoo and even the flea collars and hair brushes and puppy pads had long since been taken. Humans could make use of anything when trying to survive; they would bathe with flea and tick shampoo, eat dog food, even take medication meant for pets if there was any sensible reason it might help. And in such desperate times, the word ‘sensible’ took on a much looser meaning.
My eyes found the white bottle lying on the floor again, surrounded by red and blue and purple rocks. A part of me was surprised to see it was still there, that it didn’t somehow grow legs and walk right out of the store while my back was turned—it was as ridiculous a theory as the fact that it was there at all. How could they have missed this? How!
I inhaled a deep breath, and then crouched over the bottle. I reached out and took it into my hand, holding all of that excitement and hope deep in my lungs.
“I can’t believe it.” My heart hammered against my ribcage.
I shook the bottle, hearing the little pills inside jumping around against the sides, and my heart pounded faster. When I saw the protective plastic around the lid had not been broken, I gasped. And when I could finally accept that it wasn’t too good to be true, after all, I closed my hand tightly around the bottle and furiously rummaged the area for more. One—two more bottles! Not a single stroke of luck, or gift from God, but three! I scooped them all up, dropped them in the toy bucket and ran as fast as I could back to the beauty salon, the other few items I’d found, clutched in the other hand.