Thicker than Blood (16 page)

“Got it,” Alex said, releasing the first lock
from its loop and pocketing it. As he started on the second, Evelyn
grinned at me, excitedly shifting from foot to foot as she eagerly
waited to see what was inside. She reminded me of the old Evelyn,
before the infection, always eager to do and try new things,
clapping excitedly when she was happy, bouncing around like a
ten-year-old girl who’d just gotten the thing she’d always wanted
for her birthday.

With a happy smile on my face, I turned away,
again scanning the tree line for any sign of threats. There was
nothing, just the various shades of greens and browns of a forest,
the low hum of insects, and turned leaves dropping from their
branches and fluttering slowly to the ground. I followed one leaf
in particular as it snagged on the breeze, turning in a circle to
watch as it floated and spun through the clearing. I followed it on
its happy journey, until I had nearly turned in a complete circle
when something caught my eye and I froze in place.

“Eve!” I whispered, reaching out blindly for
her. “Alex!”

A man stood at the edge of the clearing, not
yet breaching the tree line but still discernible to the naked eye.
He was dirty and bloody, his long hair disheveled and his clothes
torn. His eyes were wild, and in his arms…

“Oh God,” Evelyn breathed. “Oh no.”

My gaze traveled down his body, my heart
skipping a beat in my chest.

In his arms, hanging limply and covered in
blood, was the tiny body of a little girl.

Evelyn

“Hands up!” Alex yelled, dropping his knife in favor
of his rifle. Quickly, he slung the weapon around himself and
raised it, showing the man that we were armed.

The man’s eyes narrowed, his mouth pressing
into a tight line as he lifted the little girl in his arms higher,
closer to his chest. It was a protective maneuver, and seeing this,
I placed a hand on Alex’s arm.

“He can’t,” I said simply, my eyes trained on
the little girl in his arms, her hair bloody and draped across her
face.

The man still hadn’t moved. His face, partly
hidden behind a long, scruffy beard, was frozen in some emotion
that I couldn’t place. Not anger, though he did seem angry, and not
sadness, though considering the condition of the child in his arms,
he should have been sad. Shifting from foot to foot, in obvious
indecision as to how to proceed, he wrinkled his brow in
consternation, as if trying to decide if we were yet another threat
to him and the girl, who was probably his daughter.

“Is this your home?” Leisel called out, her
soft voice carrying across the clearing.

The man grunted loudly in response, but
didn’t vocalize an actual yes or no.

“I’m guessing that’s a yes,” I said
quietly.

“We’ll leave,” Alex said loudly, lowering his
gun and taking a step away from the door.

I responded immediately, moving to Alex’s
side and readying myself to leave, but Leisel, ever the
compassionate one, didn’t budge. She looked at me, frowning ever so
slightly, and I knew exactly what she was thinking—that my lack of
compassion for this man and this child made me a bitch. Yes, I
couldn’t deny it; I was more than willing to turn tail and leave
these people to fend for themselves. They weren’t my problem, and I
didn’t want them to become my problem. The blood dripping from the
girl’s tiny body would undoubtedly attract the infected, it always
did, and I wasn’t emotionally ready to fight.

Not only that, but I’d seen enough death to
last me a lifetime. I didn’t need to bear witness to more if I
didn’t have to. This child was clearly going to die, if she wasn’t
already dead, and I didn’t have the stomach to stand by and watch
how this was going to unfold.

“Leisel,” Alex said. “Let’s go.” He reached
for her arm, meaning to pull her away from the door just as the
man, as if finally breaking free from his indecision, began walking
forward. His gait was strong and determined as he moved across the
small clearing toward us.

No one said a word as he came to a stop
beside us, and now that he was near us, I could smell him, and the
stench was awful. Whether it was coming from the little girl’s
wounds or their unwashed bodies, I wasn’t sure, only that it was a
struggle not to gag from the awful stink.

His clothes were filthy, his skin and hair
greasy to the point of appearing wet, yet he didn’t seem like a
vagrant just barely getting by. If anything he seemed well fed, his
shoulders large, his biceps strong.

W
e looked on while the man balanced the little girl in his
arms as he fumbled with the second lock, opening it with ease and
then kicking the door open. He kept his back to us the entire time,
obviously having decided that were weren’t a threat. That, or he
simply didn’t care.

“We should go,” I said quietly. “If she’s
bitten, she’s going to turn, and I don’t want to see that.”

Because no one in their right mind wanted to
see that, to watch a child die, let alone turn. And if that poor
little girl died and one of us had to put her out of her misery,
then what? What would happen when this man—her father—flipped out
and attacked us? Because he would; I’d seen it happen too many
times to count.

“Woman!” the man yelled from inside, his
voice gruff and impatient.

Leisel jumped, looking from the doorway to
me and back to the doorway before quickly slipping into the cabin.
I cursed her loudly, and Alex did the same. We shared a knowing
glance, me rolling my eyes and Alex looking grim, before both of us
followed her inside.

It was dark, and it took my eyes several
moments to adjust, but when they finally did, I found myself
shocked. The place was surprisingly clean, almost homelike, with
shelf after shelf of jars and boxes in different sizes and shapes.
The entire place was no larger than a ten-by-twelve room, with a
twin-sized bed on one side near a wood-burning stove, and at the
other end was a small wooden table and three lawn chairs. The man
was kneeling beside the bed, the little girl lying on top of it.
Her breaths were dry, crackling, as her little chest rose and fell
at a rapid rate.

The man was attempting to bathe her neck,
only succeeding in cleaning the blood away for a moment before the
wound would gush again. I swallowed hard. I was right; she’d been
bitten, and she would turn.

To my horror, Leisel was kneeling beside the
man, tenderly brushing hair away from the child’s face. “What can I
do?” she asked, her voice full of urgency.

“Leisel!” Alex said, his tone sharp. He was
clearly not happy about her proximity to either the man or the
bitten child, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. I felt the same,
concerned by the entire situation.

“
She’s just a little girl, Alex,” Leisel
snapped, shooting us both a look of disgust. “She needs our help.
They
both
need our
help!”

I dropped my gaze, knowing she was right.
This poor girl, she was only a child, a beautiful girl of maybe
seven or so, with long blond hair and the lips of a cherub. She was
sweet and innocent looking, apart from the bite on her neck. But it
was that very bite that made her a monster to me, one I didn’t want
to go anywhere near.

“She’s not going to be a little girl much
longer,” Alex said darkly.

The man turned then, fixing his narrowed gray
eyes on Alex, and if looks could have killed, Alex would have been
dead where he stood.

“Say that again, boy,” the man growled, and
slowly pushed himself upright.

Alex, unfazed, cocked his head to one side
and looked the man directly in the eye. “I said, she’s just a
child…
for
now
. She’s been bitten,
she’ll turn into one of
them
soon. Who knows how long she’s got,” he said, gesturing
angrily toward the bed where Leisel was still kneeling. “And I
don’t want her turning anywhere near my…”

His words trailed off as his gaze moved away
from Leisel, but I knew what he’d been about to say, what he’d
wanted to say and why he’d stopped himself. He and Leisel weren’t
anything, no matter how much he wished they were.

Placing a hand on Alex’s forearm, I stepped
in front of him, not to shield him from this man, but in an attempt
to keep the peace. My heart was telling me one thing, but my head
was telling me another. My head wanted me to run, get the hell away
from this time bomb of a child, but the other part of me, a small
voice buried deep down, told me that she was just a little girl and
this poor man, her father, deserved our help.

“How can I help?” Leisel asked again.

Several more tense seconds ticked by while
the man continued to stare over my head, his angry gaze on Alex,
until finally he gave his head a small shake and turned away. He
headed toward the small stove, his worn boots scraping noisily on
the wood floor, then bent down and poked at the small fire glowing
within.

“A bowl,” he mumbled. “Get me a bowl. I need
to sterilize the water.”

Still sitting with the child, Leisel stared
up at me, her eyes burning with an unrelenting pleading until I
couldn’t take it anymore, the guilt she forced me to feel. I turned
abruptly, going off in search of a bowl, bumbling along the shelves
filled with odd bottles of liquid, rusty cans, and mangled
boxes.

Eventually I found a bowl, a heavy metal pot
with a thick handle. Pulling it down from the shelf, I crossed the
cabin and handed it to the man. He promptly filled it with water
from a canister hanging at his hip, and after setting it on top of
the stove to boil, he busied himself with a pestle and mortar that
he used to grind some herbs. The entire time he was grinding, his
gaze flicked between the child and Alex, as if he expected Alex to
make a move when he wasn’t looking.

When the water began to hiss, bubbling over
the top of the pot, the man carefully removed it and sprinkled in
some of the crushed herbs, then mixed them together. When he seemed
satisfied with his concoction, he headed back to the bed, grunting
at Leisel to move out of his way.

Looking from the pot in his hand to the
gaping wound on the little girl’s neck, Leisel shook her head, but
reluctantly stood. Making her way back to me, her eyes were glassy
with unshed tears. While I was sad for the little girl, and for her
father as well, I was more concerned with our personal well-being.
The pustules had started to form all over her body, big white
blisters filled with pus and blood. Once that little girl turned,
rigor mortis having not yet set in, she would be a quick and
efficient weapon of death. And only sometime after, when her
muscles had become stiff, would she slow down, until eventually
she’d begin to decompose, making her movements still slow, but
fluid once again.

“We need to go,” Alex said through gritted
teeth.

“She’ll be fine,” the man said, not bothering
to turn around. “Once I clean it, she’ll be fine.”

His voice was strained, shaking ever so
slightly, and his shoulders were hunched, but his hands worked
quickly at applying his homemade herbal paste. From what I could
tell from where I stood, it seemed to have stopped the bleeding,
but it would do nothing for the infection. If the CDC hadn’t been
able to figure out a cure or even a preventative treatment, then I
doubted this man’s herbal paste had succeeded where they had
failed.

Though that didn’t mean I wasn’t hoping. That
I wasn’t standing there waiting for the blisters to retreat, for
her breathing to return to normal, for her eyes to open, to look up
at her father with a smile on her innocent face.

But that wasn’t what happened. She took a
sudden gasping breath, her chest heaving one last time, and then
she fell still, her lips forever parted in a silent
O
.

“She’s dead,” Alex said, bluntly enough that
I rewarded him with an elbow to his ribs.

Standing, his shoulders slumping even more so
than before, the man turned to look at us. I waited with bated
breath, imagining him turning feral, attacking Alex for his cruel
words. Instead he faced us, a sad and defeated man, his long hair
hanging around his face like a dark curtain of despair, his
nostrils tightly flaring as he struggled to contain his crumbling
emotions.

“She was my little girl,” he whispered
brokenly, his eyes finally meeting mine. “She was all I had left.”
His voice cracked over the last few words, and then he began to
cry. Not the subtle, unassuming tears of someone we didn’t know,
but the exhausted, heartbroken tears of a man with nothing left.
His sobs were loud and pitiful, and the more he tried to control
himself, the harder he cried.

The three of us stood frozen, unsure of what
to do, what to say, and what was there to say? We couldn’t fix
this—no one could fix this. This was what the infection did. It
attacked, it killed, it destroyed all things, beautiful and not. It
held no regard for the young or the old, for the color of their
skin or religious beliefs, for social standing or perceived
importance.

It just killed and killed and killed.

It killed everything.

Leisel began to cry with him and then, before
I could stop her, she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around
the man, this stranger. Pulling him against her, she cradled his
large shaking frame while whispering soothing noises in his ear,
much like she had done with me. One hand rubbed his back in slow,
sure circles. The familiarity of her actions was almost choking in
its awkwardness. We didn’t know him, not who he had been, nor who
he was now. Yet she was treating him as if she’d known him her
entire life. This was who she was—the caretaker, the peacemaker,
the woman people went to when they needed comfort.