Mindy McGinnis - Not a Drop to Drink

“No baby, your mommy was here to see you.”

“Is she gone now?”

“Yeah, sweetheart, she’s gone.” Lynn kept rubbing Lucy’s back in concentric circles, trying to lull her back into sleep.

“So Grandma found us?”

“She did and she saved you from your fever. You’re sick, little girl. You’re going to have to take some medicine.”

Lucy stuck out her tongue.

“Eli and I had to drive a long way to get the medicine, so it’s important, all right? I want you to take it and no argument.”

“’Kay,” came the halfhearted reply, followed by a light snoring moments later. Lynn wrapped her long arms around her, muscles tightening in a futile attempt to shield the girl from all dangers.

“I’m going to make sure nothing can hurt you ever again.”

“It’s insane,” Eli protested the next morning as Stebbs eyed them both over coffee. “I can’t believe you’d even consider letting her go.”

“I’m not in charge of her,” Stebbs said. “If Lynn wants to go, she’ll go, and neither of us can stop her.”

“You could at least tell her you disagree.”

Stebbs took a long drink before answering. “I’m not so sure I do.”

“Thanks,” Lynn said.

“You’re kidding,” Eli said in disbelief.

“Quiet,” Vera chided them from Lucy’s bedside, where the exhausted patient slept restlessly. “She’s out of the woods but can still see the trees. Would you go outside?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Stebbs said, rising to her feet.

“Stop calling me that, mister,” Vera said, and tossed a dirty pillowcase his direction. “Feel free to wash that once you’re done with your coffee. And once she’s asleep, your pants are coming off.”

Eli and Lynn both froze in mid stride, looking at each other in shock.

“I think she means to look at my leg,” Stebbs explained, and winked at them.

“I might be able to rebreak the original injury and set it correctly,” Vera said in an attempt to cover the blush that crept across her cheeks.

“Well, that’d be good,” Lynn said lamely, and hurried up the stairs, Eli close behind.

Stebbs ignored their teasing glances when he followed them outside. “Look, Eli, I know you don’t like the idea of Lynn going over there to check out their camp, but she’s right. Their strength will grow. If we’re going to do something about it, we need to do it now.”

“And what will we do?”

“I can’t say for sure until I go and look,” Lynn answered. “Could be they’re so strong we can’t do anything. Except leave.”

Hope sprang into Eli’s gray eyes. “You’d do that?”

“Worst-case scenario—maybe.”

“Listen, both of you,” Eli said, glancing between them as he spoke. “In Entargo, there was always this rumor that California was still . . . normal. That they had so many desalinization plants by the sea that they were self-sufficient, had excess even. If that’s true, we should go.”

“Rumor?” Stebbs asked, hitting hard on the word. “Where’d you hear this?”

“It was something that would get repeated a lot, you know? Bradley had heard it through military sources, but he said mostly it was kept quiet so that people wouldn’t leave, to keep them paying for water.”

“Or it’s a mercy to keep fools from wandering out west in search of something doesn’t exist,” Stebbs said. “You’d take Lynn and Lucy thousands of miles on foot without water, exposing them to God knows what on the road?”

“It’s an idea ,” Eli said defensively.

“Sorry, Eli,” Lynn said. “I’d rather shoot people in Ohio than walk to California.”

Eli snorted and looked at the ground.

“Look,” Stebbs said, trying to ease the tension between them. “I know you’re not used to the way we live out here. You’ve learned a lot, but the next lesson is a bitch. We’ve got to defend what’s ours, or we die. Lynn’s always known that, she’s lived that way to an extreme that I never went to, but there’s some sense in it. I was too comfortable, too content to see the danger those men posed. Once the smoke stopped to the south, I didn’t think about it anymore.”

“And I wasn’t smart enough to know that what I saw in the sky was the glow from electricity,” Lynn said bitterly.

“You can’t beat yourself up about that, kiddo. Vera said they’re running generators. They’ve got heat going in the houses, on top of electricity. We assumed they died; really they traded up. You had no way of knowing what you were looking at, having never seen a working lightbulb in your life.”

“Where are they getting the gasoline for generators?” Eli asked.

“Trade,” Stebbs said. “They’ve got a few women over there. Vera said a gallon of gas gets you half an hour. They’re set up in South Bloomfield,” Stebbs said. “Lynn, you familiar with that place?”

Lynn nodded. South Bloomfield was a small village by the stream to the south. It was nothing more than a bridge, a cluster of houses and a township hall at the crossroads. She’d raided the houses years ago in search of a pair of scissors.

“I’m going,” she said stubbornly. “Soon as possible.”

“At least let me come with you,” Eli said. “I don’t like the idea of you going alone.”

“Sorry, Eli, but I might as well drive right through town honking the horn as take you with me. You’re as delicate as an elephant in the woods. And Stebbs would slow me down, no offense.”

“I’m getting my leg rebroke. You’ll eat those words one day, missy.”

“’Til then I can still outrun you,” she said, ignoring the dark looks Eli gave her. “I’m going to check on Lucy.”

Vera was sorting through the prescriptions they had found when Lynn got downstairs. “How’d we do?”

“Pretty good, actually,” Vera said, holding out a bottle for Lynn to see. “This one is Augmentin. Normally I’d say it’s a little too strong for someone Lucy’s size, but it’s expired so some of the potency is lost. I’ll start her on it and see where it gets us.”

She handed her another bottle, with only a few small pills inside. “That one is amoxicillin, it’s an all-purpose antibiotic that I’d prefer to give her, but it lacks the punch of the Augmentin and there isn’t enough to keep a stable amount in her bloodstream long enough to kill off all the bacteria. You keep it, and if you ever get a cut that looks bad, take the pills until they’re gone.”

Lynn looked at Lucy, peacefully curled into a ball under her clean blanket, a freshly boiled Red Dog tucked under her chin. “This bacterial infection . . . how did she get it? Was it in the water? Something I gave her to eat?”

“I can’t say for sure how she got it, Lynn. But I can tell you that if you hadn’t been feeding her these past few months, she’d be dead for sure.”

“Right.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s just something that happened.”

“It is what it is—that’s what Mother would always say.”

“She sounds like a smart woman.” Vera smiled at Lynn and touched her shoulder. “I don’t want to upset you, but I’m going to move Lucy over to the stream house. The damp air down here could lay the groundwork for an opportunistic infection.”

“You could move her upstairs,” Lynn offered. “Plenty dry there.”

“Maybe, but the nights still get cold and judging by the ductwork I see here in your basement, there aren’t working fireplaces up there, right?”

“No,” Lynn admitted. “There’s not.”

“Eli said that little shed that he and Stebbs built is tight as a drum, holds the heat and has no drafts. I’m sorry, but in Lucy’s condition it’s the better bet over an old farmhouse.”