Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Past the Reach of Remedies
Lark dashed past a log cabin into the town square.
Trading carts sat like sleeping beasts, ringed around a three-hundred-year-old live oak, its enormous branches shading benches and flower gardens.
Several dead or dying mutants lay on the patchwork paving of brick, stone, and concrete slabs.
Milena’s sobs came from behind a vendor cart to Lark’s right.
She ran to the spot and crouched beside her friend, rubbing a hand across her shoulders, letting her know she was there.
Tommy writhed on the pavement like a pinned snake, bleeding from multiple wounds, his jaw clenched in a grimace. His torn, bloodied shirt and ripped pants leg pointed to two injuries, and his head bled from a gash. Still conscious. That was something.
“Mother of Ruin—Tommy!” Leif skidded in behind them.
“Let’s get him to our house,” Lark instructed. “Gramma will know what to do.”
“Tommy, my boy!” Hank Hayes breathed heavily over Lark’s shoulder. “Here. I’ll carry him.”
Lark, Leif, and Milena moved out of the way for the brawny miller to lift his son.
“Dad,” Tommy moaned.
“Don’t try to talk now, boy. I’m takin’ you to Inez’s place, get you checked out.”
Lark slid an arm around Milena, steadying her as they followed. Leif ran ahead. “Gramma! Tommy’s hurt.”
Their house wasn’t far. Neighbors gathered around, some holding torches to light the way. “Is he all right?” asked one.
“Abby’s in bad shape too,” added a concerned voice.
“Wyatt got himself killed,” another sighed. “Damn raiders. And what was with the mutant sidekicks? Ain’t never seen the like o’ that.”
As many invaders as there were—as many as the fighters had killed—Saltmarsh Reach was bound to suffer some casualties, but not Tommy. Please, Spirits, Gods, Universe—not Tommy.
Gramma stood in front of the open, right-wing double doors. “Put him in Leif’s bed,” she ordered. “Lark, get my medicine kit. Milena, hot water, and bandages. Leif, lights for you seein’ folk. Hurry, now!”
When Lark returned with the medicine kit, she found Tommy lying on the bed with Gramma peeling off his clothes. Leif cranked the handle on their old hurricane lamp. It was a miracle the bulb had lasted so long, but it always shone brightly when powered up.
“Here, Gramma.” Lark placed the large canvas drawstring bag in her grandmother’s hands. No one questioned how Inez Sutter could minister to the sick and injured without the sense of sight. She’d been doing it since before most of them were born.
What worried Lark wasn’t Gramma’s skill, but the contents of the “medicine” bag.
Several years ago, the modern medications had run out.
Things like the stethoscope, thermometer, and blood-pressure cuff still worked, but all that remained of old ointments was a little Vaseline coating the bottom of an ancient plastic jar.
Instead of pills and creams, the bag held honey, aloe vera, garlic, willow bark, yarrow root, and a variety of herbs.
Gramma pressed a damp cloth to Tommy’s forehead. “Leif, fetch the jug of moonshine—the one on the top shelf.” He nodded and hurriedly obeyed.
“Hank, go out and sit with your wife and daughter,” she ordered. “I know you want to help, but you’re too dang big and in the way.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he grumbled and slunk out.
“How can I help?” Milena asked, rolling her anxious fingers around each other. Lark stood close to her side again, radiating love and support for both her closest friends. Despite being just as worried about Tommy, she felt she needed to be the strong one, the anchor in the gale.
“I’ll let you know.” After gently wiping Tommy’s right arm with the cloth, Gramma sniffed each wound in turn—arm, side, leg. Only the right side of his body had taken damage, his left remaining unscathed.
“No bile, no broken bones,” she proclaimed. Relief swept through Lark like a breeze, loosening her tense muscles. Then she noticed the grave expression her grandmother still wore. She sniffed his arm again, fingertips gently tracing the torn skin.
“What is it?” Lark’s gut clenched anew.
“This wound in his arm,” she said, holding the lantern over it. “It’s a bite.” Her voice dropped. “He’s been bitten.”
Milena turned into Lark’s shoulder, her tears mingling with the blood of the slain on her soft, cotton shirt. She wrapped her arms around Milena and held on until the shaking stopped.
Bryn, who’d snuck in like a mouse into a pantry, gasped. “Does that mean he’ll turn into one of them—those mutants?”
“They aren’t werewolves,” Lark replied incredulously. Although myths about the creatures abounded, Lark understood the very real mutants held little in common with fictional werewolves. “They can’t turn people into mutants.”
“No,” Gramma confirmed. “But their bite often transfers mutated bacteria, causing swelling, fever, and, in severe cases, death. Even when we had proper antibiotics, they didn’t always work. The germs regularly mutate from one generation to the next.”
Milena straightened, and Lark’s arms fell away. “What do we do, then?” Milena stepped close to the opposite side of the bed, taking Tommy’s uninjured hand.
Leif jogged back in with the jug of ridiculously strong moonshine.
Lark recalled one time, when she’d been about his age, sneaking the jug down from Gramma’s shelf and taking a swig, just to see how it tasted—liked to burn the lining of her throat clean off for good!
After that, she lost any interest in trying it again, sticking to fruit wine or barley beer when she wanted a potent drink.
“Tommy,” Gramma said, turning his chin toward her face. “I want you to take a drink of this now, you hear?”
He swallowed and forced his eyes open. Milena helped him balance the jug as he raised it to his lips. A swig. Two coughs. A face so screwed up with displeasure you’d think he’d downed a shot of skunk oil. When Tommy was all better, Lark would tell this story to make everyone laugh.
Without a word, Gramma poured the powerful spirits over the bite wound in his arm. Sip of alcohol or not, Tommy let out a scream and tossed in the bed. “Dammit! Burns like hell!”
“Means it’s working, dear,” she answered. “Sorry. Can’t be helped. Now, an old-fashioned poultice to help draw the poison out, bandage it up, and then I’ll see to the other injuries.”
“Is he gonna be OK?” Bryn asked, brows furrowed and eyes brimming with tears.
“Too soon to tell, Magpie,” Gramma answered compassionately. “But I’ll do my best.”
Sensing how distressed the little girl had become, Lark took her hand. “Come with me, Bryn, and I’ll show you how to make willow bark tea. Tommy will need to drink some before he goes to sleep.”
“OK,” fell from her lips as her chin dropped onto her chest. Lark led her out, leaving Gramma and Milena to tend to Tommy.
“Eat something,” Gramma ordered the next morning. Lark had tossed and turned, gotten up three times during the night to check on Tommy. At first light, she’d rushed around doing everyone’s chores. Three hours later, she was chopping wood.
Lark slammed the axe into a stump and spun around, droplets of sweat stinging her eyes. “Not hungry.”
“Don’t care.” Gramma slammed fists to her hips. “You will eat something to keep up your strength. Do I need two patients to nurse? Now, get on over to the veranda and have some pork and a cornbread muffin.”
With a sigh, Lark muttered, “Fine,” and stomped away. She peeked into Leif’s room. Tommy’s mother sat with him, dousing a rag in cool water and mopping his head with it. “How is he?”
“The bleeding’s stopped, and he drank some broth a while ago, but I think a fever’s setting in.”
Lark stood silently in the doorway, trying to put it all together.
Tommy had been right beside her. When had they gotten separated?
When I ran after that bearded leader. She didn’t remember seeing him after that.
It had been dark. Chaos. Still, Lark felt a pang of guilt for leaving him. Leif. Hadn’t Leif been with him?
Backing away, she stepped onto the veranda and grabbed a muffin from the bowl.
She slathered it in butter and jam, forked a portion of pork on her plate, and grabbed a bowlful of strawberries.
She plopped down to eat, brooding over Tommy’s wounds.
Soon Rowena—Tommy’s mom—and Gramma joined her at the table.
“That was the darndest thing last night,” Gramma said. “Ain’t never heard tell of raiders and mutants teamin’ up. Too bad we can’t ask them about it.”
“Can mutants even talk?” Rowena asked and plucked a strawberry from Lark’s bowl.
Lark didn’t care. She was too busy feeling guilty. “They can make sounds.” She chomped another bite out of her messy cornbread.
“Hank said they counted fifteen dead attackers,” Rowena said, changing the subject. “Any injured ones ran off. We had two killed and a dozen wounded. Tommy’s goin’ to be just fine.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“I don’t get it,” Lark declared. “There were maybe thirty of them—forty at the most—attacking a town of eight hundred. Sure, it was dusk, they had the element of surprise, but everything about last night ran the wrong way. We’ve had cargo shipments and hunting parties raided, and, about ten years ago, a force a hundred strong fought their way into town to steal grain, but it’s early summer.
We don’t have full storehouses to plunder. ”
“You’re right,” Rowena said, as if she’d not thought of it.
Bryn wandered out of the other side of the L-shaped house and slid onto the bench beside Lark. She snuck a strawberry. “Where do the mutants come from? Where do they live when they aren’t attacking people?”
“In these parts, some come from the wastes around Old Atlanta,” Gramma answered. “Others from the Jacksonville Dead Zone. Did you know there once was a whole beautiful stretch of land south of the crater? It’s mostly under water now.”
“You mean the Sunken Kingdom?” Lark asked with interest. Sometimes, travelers would stop at Saltmarsh Reach on their way to and from places.
Several of them told about a magic castle filled with colorful fish that rested just below the surface of the water, kilometers south of the crater.
Once, it had been a vacation spot beloved by visitors the world over.
“Yep. You know, that’s how I came to be blind.”
“You weren’t always blind?” Bryn asked, head cocked toward Gramma.
“No, Magpie,” she laughed, wrinkling the corners of her eyes.
“We lived south of Savannah, north of Jacksonville. I was outside with little Roy and his sister, playing at the park. We knew a war was on, but none of the fighting was happening on our continent. Everyone thought we were safe, invincible. I was watchin’ my young’uns play on the swings and slides when a blazing white light erupted in the sky.
The kids weren’t facing south—praise all the saints and angels—but that light, as blazing as the sun, burned my retinas.
It happened to a lot of folks. For some, the flash blindness was temporary; for others, permanent. ”
“I’ll bet you were scared,” Rowena commented compassionately. Reaching, she laid a hand atop Gramma’s.
“Terrified at first,” she admitted, “but mostly because bombs were droppin’ on all the major cities.
We thought it was the end of the world, and all I could think was: I can’t let my children die.
With their papa off fightin’, I had to be strong for them, keep them safe.
So, a group of us took off north to Savannah to escape the radiation poisoning that was cuttin’ folks down like flies.
We made a stand there until the followin’ season’s hurricane leveled the city.
But we carried on. People too close to the blast zone either died of the sickness or turned mutant. ”
Lark had heard the story before. Her dad had recounted it from his perspective as a child, all the uncertainty, shifting weather patterns, constant fear of more bombs.
Leaves on the wind. Everything was so much better now.
Still, each day was one storm, one epidemic, one attack away from being someone’s last.
Three days later, Tommy’s fever raged. The bite in his arm had turned an angry red, oozing with pus, despite Gramma and every other healer in town’s best efforts.
“We need better medicine,” Milena lamented.
“Antibiotics,” Gramma supplied. The three of them stood in the room where he still lay, now burning up, alternating between chills and sweats. It was hard to get any liquids into him.
Saltmarsh Reach was still trying to recover from the raid.
Emotions high. People were jumpy, on edge, fear breeding discontent.
Some folks were riled up, saying, “Why doesn’t the queen build military posts in the south?
” “Why are there no troops to protect us down here?” “Don’t we pay taxes like everyone else? ”
“Queen Frost will help us,” Milena proclaimed. She turned a hopeful gaze to Lark. “If we go to Nelanta, we can ask for medicine, for antibiotics. Saltmarsh Reach hasn’t received a fresh supply in years. She can’t turn us away. I know she’ll help.”
The desperate longing in Milena’s voice, her eyes, her soul, ripped at Lark’s heart as much as seeing Tommy suffer. She licked her lips, clenched her jaw. “I’m going.”
“Not without me!” Lark glanced over her shoulder at Leif.
Her little brother was as tall as she was, and, while not quite as strong and agile, every bit as stubborn. “And me.”
Milena’s fingers curled around Lark’s upper arm as she leaned close. “We’ll all three go. That way, you’ll have other voices to testify that what you say is true. Queen Frost will give us the medicine we need—I just know it.”
“How will you get there and back fast enough?” asked Bryn, who sat in a corner with her knees pulled up to her chin.
“Take three of Talon Jones’ horses,” Gramma directed. “Tell him I said so—he still owes me. They’re the fastest of the lot. Do you know how to get there?”
“I’ve got Dad’s old map,” Lark answered. “If we don’t waste time, we can be there in two days—and we won’t waste time.”
“Let me pack you some vittles to carry along, and be watchful,” old Inez charged. “Those stragglers who attacked us could still be out there.”
“Don’t worry, Gramma,” Lark assured her with a hug and a kiss. “They’re the ones who need to watch out.”