Chapter 1 #2
It took her a second to process the question. "Knife."
"Just the knife?"
A slow nod, like even that motion cost something.
"Set it down. Slide it toward him." He nodded at the forward watcher.
She fumbled at her belt with fingers that weren't cooperating and managed to work a small folding knife loose. It dropped more than it was set down. The watcher retrieved it without taking his eyes off her.
David opened the gate himself.
She took one step through it and her legs simply quit.
David closed the distance and caught her before she hit the ground.
She weighed next to nothing in his arms — that alone was enough to worry him.
Her face and neck felt fever-hot, but her hands were cold, and her eyes were losing whatever grip they'd had on staying open.
"Name," David said. "Can you tell me your name."
Her mouth moved. Nothing useful came out at first. Then her hand found his sleeve and gripped it with more strength than he'd have guessed she had left.
"Don't let them find me."
"Who?"
One word, barely audible.
"Ravagers."
Then her hand went slack and her head dropped against his shoulder, and she was gone from the conversation entirely.
Karen arrived at a near run, bag already open in her hands before she reached them, and dropped to her knees beside where David had laid the woman on the ground just past the gate.
"How long's she been down?"
"Thirty seconds. Less."
"She walk here?"
"Far as anybody can tell."
Karen checked airway, breathing, pulse at the wrist and then the throat, pressed a thumb briefly against a fingernail and watched the color come back slowly.
She peeled back one eyelid, then the other.
Ran a hand along the woman's scalp, checking for anything that mattered under all that matted hair.
Then she looked at the boots — or what was left of them — and pulled one off carefully. What was underneath made her go quiet for a second.
Blisters, broken and reblistered. A wound along one heel had gone past raw. The skin around it was red and swollen, with yellow drainage dried along one edge. She checked the other foot. Similar, if slightly less bad.
"She didn't get like this overnight," Karen said.
"How long?"
"Long enough." She was already working, wetting a cloth and touching it to the woman's lips, not pouring anything, just enough to wet them. "I need her inside. Somewhere warm. And I need her moved careful — she's dehydrated bad enough that I don't want her jostled more than she has to be."
David looked at the men on the gate. "Keep this covered. Somebody get up on the rise, see if there's anything on her backtrail. Nobody goes looking yet."
One of the younger men — Cody, David thought, though he wasn't looking to be sure — said something about following her trail back while it was fresh.
"No," David said. "Not yet. We don't know how old that trail is, or if somebody's sitting on the end of it waiting to see who comes looking."
Nobody argued with that.
They put together a litter out of two poles and a spare canvas tarp rather than waste time hitching the wagon for what wasn't far to carry.
David took one end, Russ — who'd come at a jog once word reached him — took the other.
Smokey trotted alongside, nose working, head swinging every so often back toward the road behind them.
Grace met them partway up the path, took one look at the woman on the litter, and didn't ask what had happened.
"What does Karen need?"
"Warm room. Clean water. Broth, if she's got any made — not much of it," Karen said, walking alongside with a hand on the woman's wrist, still counting something.
Grace was already moving toward the house.
David checked the backtrail with Russ once the woman was settled and Karen had run everyone else out of the room.
They found her tracks easy enough where she'd come down off the ridge through the trees — uneven, weaving, one stretch where she'd clearly gone down on hands and knees to get over a fallen trunk instead of around it.
No sign of anyone moving behind her. No boot prints crossing hers.
No broken brush that suggested somebody pushing through in a hurry.
"Could've lost whoever she was running from miles back," Russ said, crouched over one print, studying it like it might tell him more if he looked long enough.
"Could have."
"Could also be nobody."
"Could be."
Neither of them said the rest of it out loud, which was that they didn't know, and wouldn't until she was well enough to say more than a word or two.
David went through her pack before they brought it inside, mostly out of necessity — he needed to know what she was carrying before it went anywhere near her while she wasn't conscious to explain herself.
It didn't take long. A few scraps of unidentifiable dried food.
An empty canteen with a crack along one seam.
A spare pair of socks worn through at the heel.
A photograph, creased soft from handling, that he didn't look at closely enough to make out who was in it.
And a bundle wrapped in a scrap of plastic sheeting, tied off with a shoelace, thick with paper.
David turned it over once. Through a gap in the plastic he could see lines of small handwriting and printed columns — numbers, codes, something that looked official. He didn't unwrap it further. Whatever it was, it wasn't his to open yet.
He set it with the rest of her things and carried the pack inside.
She slept most of the first day, waking once in the evening confused enough to ask where she was, taking in the unfamiliar ceiling and the lamp burning low and Karen's face above her with something like fear before Karen spoke.
"You're safe enough for tonight," Karen told her, which was true as far as it went and not a promise of anything more.
She went back under almost before the sentence finished.
Karen worked in small amounts through the night and into the next day — wetting her lips at first, then giving her small amounts of water mixed with salt and sugar once she could swallow safely, broth coming later when she could keep it down.
She watched for fever and cleaned and dressed both feet with what antiseptic they had left.
The heel wound worried her enough that she checked it twice as often as the rest.
On the second day the woman was awake longer, ate a little more, and asked, in a voice still rough but steadier, about her pack.
"It's safe," Karen told her.
Something in her face loosened at that. She didn't ask about money, or jewelry, or anything David would have expected somebody desperate to ask about first.
"The papers," she said instead.
"They're there. Nobody's touched them."
She nodded, satisfied, and let her eyes close again.
Karen asked, gently, what they were.
"My husband's." She turned her face toward the wall and didn't say anything else.
By the third day she could sit up on her own and hold a cup without her hands shaking too badly to manage it.
Her thinking had cleared enough that when Karen was redressing the heel wound and asked a question about how it had first started — whether it began as a blister or a cut — the woman answered with enough precision, using enough of the right words, that Karen stopped what she was doing and looked at her.
"You medical?"
A pause. "Doctor."
Karen held still a beat longer than the moment strictly required.
"What kind?"
"Family medicine. Did emergency room shifts too, when they were short." Her voice was flat, worn down past the point of it meaning anything to her yet. "Small hospital. Not big enough to have specialists for everything."
Karen nodded once and went back to the dressing without another word.
David was out at the fence with Ben that afternoon, splicing a broken rail, when Karen came walking up with a set to her shoulders that told him this wasn't about anybody needing stitches.
"She worse?" he asked, straightening.
"Better." A pause. "Better enough to talk."
He wiped his hands on his jeans. "All right."
Karen didn't move to leave. David caught it.
"What?"
"She's a doctor."
That stopped him for a second. "A doctor."
"Actual doctor. Family medicine, some ER work." Karen said it plainly, no more weight on it than the facts carried on their own, though David understood exactly how much weight that was without her needing to spell it out.
"That's not why I came to get you, though," she added.
"What is?"
"Her husband."
A beat.
"You need to hear what she has to say."
Grace was already in the room when David came in, sitting near the bed with a cup of something warm in her hands, ready to pass it over.
The woman was propped up against a folded blanket, thinner than anyone should be and still looking better than she had at the gate — color back in her face, eyes clear if hollow.
"I'm sorry," she said, before anyone else spoke. "For how I came in. I don't—"
"Nothing to apologize for," David said.
Grace handed her the cup. She took it with both hands, like she needed the extra grip to hold it steady, and drank slow.
Karen stood near the door, arms crossed, watching her with the same attention she gave any patient who wasn't out of the woods yet.
"I want to tell you before I sleep again," the woman said. "I keep losing time. I don't want to lose this too."
"Take your time," David said. "Nobody's rushing you."
She nodded, gathered herself.
"My name is Rebecca. Rebecca Hale." A breath. "My husband was Daniel."
Nobody said anything. She kept going, like stopping might mean she couldn't start again.
"We weren't from around here. We'd been staying east of here since — since it happened. We made it through the fall all right. Winter got hard. Our stores ran low faster than we planned for, and we heard there might be people, a real community, somewhere this direction. So we started walking."
"How long ago?" David asked.
"Nine days. Ten, maybe. I've lost track some."
"What happened?"
She looked down at the cup in her hands.