Capture (35 page)

I scrubbed a hand down my face.
“So you'll risk it all for the Pulitzer and the fame.”

“
It’s not about getting some award or being famous. It's about making all this matter and their struggles and sacrifices and deaths make a difference for others in this stupid world. If we leave, if I don't tell their story, the whole story, it'll be like it never even happened."

I stared off in the distance, feeling the crushing weight of defeat. There was no getting through to her.

"You can’t leave these people any more than I can," she said, her voice softer now. "They’re not just nameless, faceless refugees. I know their names and the dreams they were forced to leave behind and the dreams they can hardly dare to dream now. I could never turn my back on them and walk away any more than you could.” She swept an arm out wide to encompass the entire village. “If even one person in this village survives, then this place will be a success, because that’s one life lived in freedom that otherwise would have been wasted in prison. Don't you want to stay and be a part of that?”

Her words were stirring something dangerous deep inside me, something that wasn't safe for me to think about. So I pushed those chaotic feelings away.
“You’re talking about staying here for years if necessary. You’re really prepared to stay here that long until the world is ready to hear about some backwoods trailer park in the middle of nowhere?”

Her lips pressed tight together as she took a deep breath
in through her nose, then let it out. “Actually, I'm not sure I was ever planning on leaving here. This place isn’t something that will happen overnight. It may take decades for this village to grow into what it can become, and somebody's got to be here to chronicle it every step of the way so others can follow in our footsteps and start their own havens. You and I both know what it has the potential to be. You described it yourself when we first got here, so don’t lie to me and say you can’t see it too.”

I didn’t answer her because she was right.
If these people could survive the disease and the rest of the winter months, this village could be amazing. But the odds were just too high against that ever happening now.

“
But it means living the rest of your life here, Tarah. With no internet, no mall, no going to college. What if you can never see your brother or your parents again? Is it really worth devoting your whole life to?”

Her chin rose another inch.
“I can’t imagine a more worthy cause.”

And that’s when I knew
...I was
never
going to convince her to leave. This place had become some kind of Holy Grail crusade for her. And even if I dragged her away from this place, the minute she got free she would come running right back.

CHAPTER 22

Monday, December 28
th

W
e didn’t speak to each other for the next few days. Not even after glaring at each other from opposite sides of the village’s first grave as the makeshift coffin was lowered into its cold resting place in the harder than cement earth. The entire settlement, at least the ones who weren’t sick yet, had argued for hours about whether they should burn the body. I’d told them to bury it; everyone was already exposed to the virus, and burning the body would only send up a huge smoke cloud that would forced the already exhausted Mike to do a spell to hide it. It was already a full time job for witches with wind control abilities to keep a breeze blowing over our chimneys strong enough to disperse our small fireplaces’ smoke.

But I hadn’t stuck around for the
ir final vote. I’d only known what everyone had decided to do with the body when two guys had shown up to borrow some power tools to make the coffin with.

No one had said much at the funeral.
Probably too afraid or in shock.

I watched Tarah watching me across that hole that had taken several men hours and a lot of
spells to chip out, and I wondered what she was thinking. Did she understand that this was only the first of who knew how many deaths to come? Did she care that helping the healers in the infirmary every day only increased her chances of being buried somewhere near this gravesite?

How many graves would it take to convince her to leave?

I wanted to say all of these things to Tarah. But I didn’t. What would be the point? If looking right at the evidence of how dangerous this situation was didn’t scare or convince her, nothing I could say would either.

Thursday, December 31
st

In the days after the funeral, we kept to our corners, she at the infirmary, me at the tiny house, which was finally starting to look like a real house.
I’d bought LED lanterns so I could work in the dark and gotten the roof on and the exterior siding up. But with every day that passed, I became more aware of how my time was running out to find one last way to protect her. I had no idea how long I had before Tarah’s immune system failed us both. How long could she go on risking the odds with constant, daily exposure to the virus before she was exposed one too many times, breathed in one too many breaths of infected air, handled one too many germ-infected washcloths?

I limited myself to a single meal a day, my dinners dropped off by Tarah in silence and received with only a brief thanks from me.
She never stayed to talk or help with the house anymore, leaving me to eat alone in the cold. And yet, every night, whether she realized it or not, her hand continued to slip over and hold mine when I finally gave in to exhaustion and crashed on the couch near her.

That one bit of
daily contact with her was enough to keep me hoping that somehow we’d make it through this together.

I took to reading the kit’s instruction manual while I ate, counting the steps left to be completed like a general plotting his next battle strategies for his army.
Except there was no army helping me out. Everyone who wasn’t at the infirmary had banded together to use various spells to laboriously chip out holes for septic system tanks and field lines in the hopes that a proper indoor water system would improve the general hygiene and wipe out the disease. Which left me on my own with my limited tools and even more limited knowledge and time.

As the final days of December passed, I grew ever more desperate.
I skipped steps, reasoning that I couldn’t glue down the shower stall or flooring in the rest of the house due to the cold preventing the adhesives from holding and drying properly. I couldn’t glue together the plumbing either for the same reason. So I just set everything in place for now.

I built the porch and loft spaces, put in windows and doors, stuffed in rolls of insulation everywhere.
It was while I was running the wiring on New Year’s Eve that I heard the shouting.

I opened my house’s new front door, stood on
my newly created porch at the end of the trailer furthest from the hitch, and looked outside. It was Steve and Pamela again. Turning around, I went back inside, shut the door and found myself silently wishing Steve good luck with his arguments. I sure as heck couldn’t begrudge the guy for trying to do the exact same thing I wished I could do and get the woman I loved out of here to safety. Maybe I’d even put the spark plug back into the bus for him. The only reason I hadn’t used the bus myself as a temporary home for Tarah and me was because running its engine to keep it warm enough would quickly use up its fuel tanks, and I was pretty sure the gas stations in town would notice if I kept bringing in the same bus to refuel.

Though I tried to ignore their argument, I still
couldn’t help but sneak a peek out through the living room window at Pamela. Maybe she and the other healers were finally making some progress in fighting the virus, and she had reason to want to stay?

The slump of her shoulders and dark circles beneath her eyes
, visible even from a distance, killed that brief bit of hope.

How could Tarah expect me to be hopeful when even the healers looked defeated and ready to give up?

That evening, I had just squatted down in the living room area, getting ready to tackle the wood burning stove’s installation, when someone knocked on my door.

I looked up, expecting to see Tarah.

It was Mike.

I turned up the light on the lantern and waved him in.

He entered, looking up and around him for a few seconds. “You’ve gotten a lot done in here.” His tone sounded as dead as I felt.

Sighing, I rubbed the back of my neck where the muscles constantly burned now.
“Yeah, I guess so.” But was it fast enough? Something inside me kept telling me to keep working, to move faster, to skip anything not immediately needed to make the place livable for Tarah. “I don’t guess you’d happen to know how to put together a wood burning stove, would you?”

Mike glanced at the cast iron contraption in front of me.
“Uh, not really. Listen, I came to tell you, we had another death.”

I stared at the stove.
“I was afraid that was going to happen. Anyone I know?”

“
Harvey Lansing. I think he was—”

“
One of the loggers I worked with.” Yeah, I remembered him and how he’d liked to kid around, no matter how tired he was. In fact, it had seemed like the more tired Harvey had gotten, the more he’d needed to tell a joke.

“
And Pamela’s sick now too,” Mike added.

My insides knotted up.
If the healers were getting sick now, maybe it was time to rethink that idea of tying Tarah up and dragging her out of here against her will. Grandma Letty might even approve of keeping Tarah a captive for her own good. When the whole village got sick and died, she wouldn’t have much of a story to write about anymore anyways. Then she’d understand.

With the healers going down for the count, how much faster might the virus spread?

Mike shuffled his feet a bit. I glanced up at him.

At my questioning look, he quit fidgeting and murmured,
“Tarah’s sick too.”

It felt like I was paralyzed while the entire world fell out from underneath me.
“Tarah’s sick?”

He
nodded, staring at me. Waiting for my reaction.

My time was up.

I grabbed the lantern and thrust it at Mike. “Here, hold this up so I can see better.”

He took the lantern
out of instinct, his mouth opening like he wanted to say something else.

“
How long?” I asked as I grabbed the instruction booklet.

“
Huh?”

“
How long as she been sick?”

“
Pamela or—”

“
Tarah! How long?” I pawed through the stove’s sections and pieces on the floor.

“
An hour, maybe two, but that’s just a guess. You know Tarah. She was probably running a fever for awhile and just didn’t say anything. One of the healers noticed she was sweating real bad and made her lie down.”

I started connecting the chimney pipe sections.
“Hand me that wrench over there.”

Silence.

I held out a hand. “Mike!”

I looked up at him.
He was standing there staring at me like an idiot. Growling, I reached past him for the wrench.

“
Aren’t you even going to go see her?” he asked, his voice cracking.

“
I’ve got to get this done first.” My wrist popped in protest as I screwed the connector cuff’s bolt into place on the chimney pipe.

“
Everyone’s right. You have gone nuts.” Muttering a curse, Mike set the lantern on the floor then barreled out of the house, slamming the door so hard behind him that its window pane cracked.

I worked as quickly as I could to get the stove set up.
But it still took too long before I could get a fire going in it and check to make sure it was safe. Then I had to go to one of the houses for sleeping bags, sheets, a pillow, an iron pot, and a bucket. It took several trips to get everything I needed into my house, and too long to get it all set up even though I pushed my exhausted body to run every step I took.

No time, no time,
my heart beat out with each pulse.

Then I ran for the infirmary, finally allowing my feet to carry me to the one place I’d wanted to go right from the start.

“Hayden,” Tarah whispered as I knelt beside her pallet in what used to be the house’s living room area. Her hair, once so beautiful and wild, the black curls shiny and bouncy with life, now clung to her forehead and the sides of her sunburn red cheeks in sweat-soaked clumps.

Nearby, Steve sat beside his wife.
We shared a brief look, his eyes haunted and bleak.

I peeled the damp covers off of Tarah.

“What are you doing?” Mike cried out as he returned from the master bedroom. He grabbed my shoulder.

But I’d forgotten how to be human or polite.
Some part of me, the logical, sane side, watched as if from a distance while I growled at him and jerked my shoulder free. “Back off.”

I slipped my arms under Tarah’s wet back and bare knees.
They’d stripped her down to just an oversized t-shirt and her underwear. As soon as I lifted her up, I could feel her whole body shivering.

She was too light in my arms, impossibly fragile.
How could this small body house a spirit as big as Tarah’s?

“
Open the door,” I told Mike, who continued to stare at me in shock. “Now, dammit!”

When he still refused to move, I was forced to use the hand under Tarah’s back to awkwardly turn the handle on the storm door enough to get it unlatched.
Then I kicked it the rest of the way open.

Tarah whimpered as the cold air hit us.

“I know, honey,” I muttered, only half aware of what I was even saying as I eased us down the cement steps. “Almost there. Hang on.”

By the time we reached
the tiny house, her teeth were chattering so hard I was worried she’d bite her own tongue off. I got her inside and onto the thick pallet I’d made for her a few feet away from the stove. As soon as she was down, I covered her with layer after layer of blankets and sheets.

“
I’ve got to get more firewood,” I muttered, brushing the clumps of hair back from her face. “I’ll be right back.”

I ran outside, came back with all the firewood I could carry in one trip, added a
nother log to the fire. Then I poured some water into the pot and set it on top of the stove to heat.

Someone came bursting into the house behind me while I was wringing out the first washcloth.
A healer maybe. I didn’t know, didn’t care.

“
Mr. Shepherd,” the stout sounding woman began.

I ignored her, washing Tarah’s face before folding the cloth and laying it over her forehead.
Her lips were starting to crack. Maybe I had some chapstick somewhere in my truck? Once I got Tarah settled in, I’d go look.

Then I realized the woman was still standing there.
“Shut the door. You’re letting out all the heat.”

“
You can’t just come barging in and steal a patient—”

“
It’s not a hospital. Tarah’s not yours to keep. And it doesn’t sound like you healers were doing any better than I can with her anyway. Now shut the damn door please.” I stood up, my hands clenching at my sides, hoping the woman wouldn’t keep pushing me. I’d been raised never to hit a woman, and I sure didn’t want to start now.

She gasped, apparently at a loss for words as she took a nervous step backwards
onto the porch.

Then I remembered they might need new herbs or something from town.
But I wasn’t going to be able to go that far away from Tarah. I dug the truck keys out of my jeans pocket and tossed them to her. She barely managed to catch them against her ample chest.