The day after: An apocalyptic morning (87 page)

              "I suppose," Paul said doubtfully. "You're the expert, not me."

              "I can do it," he said. "I'll plan on doing that first thing after we solve the fuel storage problem."

              Paula obviously had her own thoughts about this but she kept them to herself for the moment. Jack had some thoughts as well - he wanted to go along on that mission - but he did the same.

              With the Auburn discussion run into the ground they turned the video back on and watched the view of the Sacramento Valley for a few minutes. Jack had done an admirable job of capturing the essence of what they had seen. First he had filmed a long-range shot showing the water stretching off into the distance. Then he had filmed close-ups of the debris and the bodies bobbing in the water. Everyone was strangely silent as they saw what had become of some of the most fertile land on earth.

              The last shots on the video were the views of the abandoned town of El Dorado Hills. Jack moved to turn the camera off but Skip told him to let it run.

              "It's just an abandoned town," Jack said. "What's the big deal?"

              "There's something not right there," Skip said. "I don't know what it is, but El Dorado Hills is different than Colfax and Meadow Vista."

              "Different how?" Paul asked as the picture showed the walled subdivisions with the neat, geometric rows of houses.

              Skip shook his head, trying to lock in on the fleeting sensation at the tip of his brain. There were winding, paved streets, dying lawns, the occasional flooded swimming pool. A few parks dotted the landscape here and there and there were a few vehicles sitting in some of the driveways. Aside from that, there was nothing. "I don't know," he repeated. "But there's something."

              It was Paula who figured it out. She had been staring at the screen as intently as everyone else had when suddenly it came to her. "There's no bodies," she said. "That's what's different. In Meadow Vista and Colfax there were bodies lying around. There aren't any down there!"

              "That's it," Skip said, the light bulb going on. "There aren't any dead there! Why not?"

              Now that it had been pointed out, everyone wondered why they hadn't seen it before. Not everyone seemed to feel that this was significant however.

              "So there's no bodies?" Jack asked. "What's the big deal about that?"

              "I must say," Paul said, "that I don't really see the significance."

              "It means that the fate of El Dorado Hills, whatever that might be, is different than that of the other towns," Paula said. "What happened to the people there? Did they all die inside their houses? That's not what happened in the other towns."

              "We don't know what happened in the other towns," Paul pointed out. "Why did the people in Meadow Vista and Colfax die outside? If you were starving to death and about to succumb, why would you leave your house? Why wouldn't you just stay inside? You can't make some kind of inference about El Dorado Hills just because you don't see dead bodies there."

              The discussion went on for quite some time, until they heard people starting to fill the gym downstairs for dinner. They reached no firm conclusions on the Micker. It was only later, as he was walking home for the evening with Christine and Paula, his mind starting to come out of the marijuana haze, that Skip realized what it was about the town that was really jigging him. Except for the lack of people on the streets, El Dorado Hills looked eerily the same as Garden Hill. It looked like a town that was occupied and being cared for to some degree.

              Sherrie Philo, the woman who had been shot in the leg during the battle, was still staying in the same room she had been originally brought to, the room that Dale had died in. The reasoning behind this was simple. Sherrie couldn't walk or get out of bed. Paul had installed a traction splint - a bulky, metal device designed to keep the broken ends of the femur from slipping or grating together - on her shattered leg. Since Sherrie required around the clock care in order to urinate or take care of other bodily functions, the community center was the logical place for her to stay since there was someone there twenty-four hours of every day.

              Paul took care of most of the medical Mickers for Sherrie. He checked the status of her leg every few days and saw to it that she took her blood thinner pills. He gave her codeine tablets or Tylenol when she was in pain and Valium or Prozac tablets when she was in the midst of a severe depression (as she was prone to these days). The other aspects of her care, bathing, dressing, and of course giving and retrieving bedpans, fell mostly upon Janet, Paul's wife. She would often come up to check on her during her shifts in the day care center downstairs and would arrange to have one of the female community center guards take care of this during the night.

              Both Paul and Janet were gratified to see that Sherrie had finished her dinner this night, something that she had never done during the first few weeks of her convalescence but that was becoming more frequent as time went on.

              "Good girl," Paul told her, grabbing a seat next to her and sitting down. "I'm glad you're finally listening to me about maintaining your nourishment."

              "I'm finally getting my appetite back," she said softly. She looked up at Paul. "Why are your eyes so red?" she asked him.

              "Never mind," Paul said with a chuckle. "It's time for your calcium pill."

              "He was helping the helicopter crew celebrate their mission," Janet said, giving him a wifely look. "It seems they thought a little herbal stimulation would help them debrief."

              Sherrie giggled a little, something else that she was starting to do with increasing frequency. "I guess your appetite's been pretty good today too, huh?"

              "He did seem to enjoy his dinner quite a bit," Janet said.

              "All right, all right," Paul said, opening the vitamin bottle he carried and fishing one out. "Enough nagging. Let's get the pill down, shall we?"

              "I guess we shall," Sherrie said, taking it and washing it down with the warm, powdered lemonade that she had with dinner.

              "So how's the leg today?" Paul asked her, turning serious. "You think those bone ends are coming together yet?"

              "God, I hope so," she said. Paul had promised her that the moment he was confident the bone was knitting together he would remove the traction splint and replace it with a rigid thigh cast of some sort so that she could walk with the aid of crutches. "You can't imagine how anxious I am to go out and see the rain again. You can't imagine how much of a luxury it is to pee in a toilet."

              "Ahh, the little things in life," Paul said, making her grin. "Let's take a look at it."

              Sherrie pulled back the sheet that covered her, revealing one of the plain cotton nightgowns that she was perpetually dressed in. Janet helped her change them whenever she bathed her. The hem of it was just above her knees but Paul, without hesitation or embarrassment, grabbed hold of it and hiked it up to her upper thighs. Sherrie's right leg, the uninjured one, was very nicely shaped and toned. Before the comet she had been the stereotypical trophy wife to a gynecologist and had worked out obsessively in order to maintain the shape that had allowed her to snag such a catch in the first place. Since her injury she had been exercising that leg three times a day by wrapping a bungee cord around her foot and pushing against the resistance to keep it from atrophying from disuse. The skin was pale of course, as was everyone's these days in the absence of both sunlight and tanning salons, but it was clean shaven and smooth, the work of Janet and her razor. The left leg was a sharp contrast. It was surrounded by the stainless steel braces of the splint that held it in place and the muscle tone was slack and soft. A large circular scar marred the top of the thigh marking the spot where the .30 caliber bullet she had been shot with had exited. Paul had sewn the wound shut the first day using thread and a needle that he had sterilized with boiling water. Though it had kept her from bleeding or getting a staph infection, it had not healed up very prettily.

              Paul placed his hand on the scar, feeling the warmth of her flesh. He probed gently with his fingers, trying to palpate the femur beneath. As he concentrated on the sensations beneath his hand, his eyes could not help but notice that Sherrie's legs were slightly apart and that she was not wearing any panties. The dark shadow of her black pubic hair was plainly visible beneath the hem of her robe. He looked away uncomfortably, trying to concentrate his vision on her leg. Though he had seen her several times in all of her glory during the first few days of her injury, it was different somehow now that she was healing and fully awake.

              "What do you think?" Sherrie asked him, pretending not to notice where his eyes had just been.

              "It seems like you got one continuous bone under there," he said. "The question is whether it's knitted together enough that it won't just snap again once I take off the splint. I think that another three or four days here should do it."

              "Three or four days?" she whined. "My God, I'm going crazy in here."

              "If I let you go too early and you re-break that femur, you're going to end up right back in here for another month," he told her. "And there's no telling whether or not it will grow back together as well the next time."

              "Better safe than sorry," Janet said.

              "I suppose," Sherrie sighed. She reached up to pull her nightgown back down now that the exam was over. Paul, unable to help himself, cast one more look at her pubic hair before she hid it. Again Sherrie noticed but pretended not to.

              The three of them talked for a few minutes, mostly about the helicopter mission and the discovery of other survivors in Auburn, things that Sherrie had heard rumor of but had not had confirmed as of yet. She asked if Skip or anyone in the helicopter had seen Jessica during the mission.

              "No," Paul said, looking at her a little suspiciously. Sherrie had once been a member of Jessica's inner circle, both before and after the comet. "By the time he took off she was off the Interstate. We don't know where she is now. All we know is that she hasn't tried to come back into town."

              Sherrie nodded slowly. "She was insane towards the end," she told them. "Absolutely insane. When I heard those gunshots yesterday morning I knew it was her doing it, I just knew. Thank God she didn't hurt anyone."

              "She hurt plenty of people," Paul said. "She's a big part of the reason you got shot."

              "No," Sherrie said, shaking her head strenuously. "She didn't get me shot. I got me shot. Don't try to push my stupidity off on her. I'm the one that jumped up and tried to run, I'm the one who is to blame for me laying here."

              Paul and Janet both looked at her for a moment, both surprised by the ferocity of her tone.

              "I'm sorry," Sherrie said, seeing their looks. "I've had plenty of time to do soul searching since I've been laying in here, more time than I ever wanted. At first I blamed everyone for what happened to me. I blamed Skip, I blamed Christine, I blamed Jessica, I blamed the comet, I blamed God, I blamed everyone and everything but myself." She sighed. "But none of that is true. I made a decision out there. I chose to get up and run while people were shooting at us. I panicked and now I'm paying the consequences. I'm not the same person that did that. I was a shallow bitch before, looking down my nose on everyone because it made me feel better. I used to look down on both of you, did you know that? I used to think I was better than you because I had been married to a doctor and you Janet were nothing but a teacher who had to work for a living and you Paul were nothing but a civil servant living off tax dollars."

              "Sherrie," Janet said, "you don't have to..."

              "I do," she interrupted. "Just let me say this."

              "Okay," she said softly.

              "I was wrong about both of you. You two thought me a snob, and I was one. You two had no reason to care about me or like me and I'm sure that you didn't. But you two have taken care of me from the moment I was dragged in here. Paul, you've fought to keep me alive, Janet, you've helped me pee and helped me wipe my butt. You two did this even though I was a bitch to you both, even though I sided with Jessica against you at every turn, even though I've given you no reason whatsoever to give a damn about me."

              "It's what we do, Sherrie," Paul said, patting her leg gently. "Despite how we felt about you, you're still a human being. Did you think we were going to let you die if we could prevent it?"

              "You don't understand," she said, a tear running down her face. "I wouldn't have done the same for you. I wouldn't have come in here and emptied bedpans if you had been the one shot, Janet. I wouldn't have come up here every hour and made sure you were still breathing if it had been you, Paul. My way was to let someone else handle it. Your way is to do it. I was sadly wrong about who was better than whom."

              "Nobody's better than anyone around here," Paul told her. "We're all just people and that's how everyone should treat each other."