Amanda Carter in the L.A.Z., life after zombies (39 page)

“No problem,” Cole said, suddenly feeling freer as he hopped into the passenger seat, after Sam had climbed into the backseat.

Roy started the Jeep and slowly cruised toward the sedan, with Cole peering through the binoculars, looking for anything that might be trouble up ahead.

“Do you get many passersby out here?” Cole asked.

“No, Amanda’s occasionally spotted a vehicle or two off in the distance while out on the runs, but we’ve never seen anybody out here,” Roy answered.

Now the little forest-green mini wagon was coming into clear view, and Cole lowered the binoculars. Nothing was moving in the area, and he told Roy that it looked safe to pull up a little farther.

Roy stopped the Jeep in front of the vehicle in question, and they all climbed out, careful to be watchful. But still, nothing moved, except for the vultures overhead.

Cole moved forward, gun drawn and ready, to peer into the mini wagon. It looked like someone had been trying to live out of the car. There was a small collection of empty water bottles in the back hatch portion, a blanket spread across the backseat with a pillow, and a few unopened cans of food stacked on the passenger seat. Cole circled the car but found no sign of life. Several empty tin cans, which had once contained food, were scattered off to the side.

Seeing that Cole was occupied with the car, Roy and Sam began to look farther past the vehicle. A large lizard scurried away from them, causing Sam to jump back a little in surprise. So far, if not for the carrion birds, they would have figured this location to be abandoned.

“See anything?” Cole asked, after flipping open the glove compartment of the car to read the registration.

“Nope,” Roy answered back, still looking and beginning to broaden his search.

“Look, over there,” Sam said. “See it?”

Roy followed the direction that Sam had pointed, barely making out what looked like a swatch of clothing stuck on a bush.

“We might have found something,” Roy said, beginning to take the lead in that direction.

Cole caught up to them quickly.

“It’s a woman,” Sam said, starting to move past Roy to go and check it out.

Roy put his arm up to block the girl, using it to gently push her back.

“Hold on a second,” he whispered to Sam. “We don’t know what we’ve found yet. It’s best that you wait here.”

“I agree,” Cole said, starting to move forward, cautiously stepping toward the figure that as yet had not moved.

Roy followed right on Cole’s heels, while Sam waited anxiously, biting at her lower lip and shielding her eyes from the sun with a hand.

Once they had closed in, it was easy to see where the woman had used a garden trowel to cut away some of the earth from the bank to make a small alcove for herself in the side of the mountain. She would have been seeking shelter, and the earth would have been cooler than the vehicle, especially if she had any prolonged plans of staying out here in this type of heat. But it was clear, by what Cole had witnessed back at the car, that she had run out of water, and that was a death sentence in this desert during the summer months.

“Is she moving?” Sam asked, unable to contain her curiosity.

Chapter 64

T
he woman was curled into a ball with her back against the mountain and an arm over her face. She had long all-gray hair, and some of it had spread over the arm that was shielding her face. It was easy to see that the woman was small.

“What do you think?” Roy asked, wondering if the woman was still alive.

“If the registration on the vehicle is accurate, we’ve just found Sky Ryder,” Cole said. “And I can’t tell if she’s alive. I’ll have to get closer.”

“Sky Ryder,” Roy repeated. “Who has a name like that?”

“Cool name,” Sam said, trying to peer past the two men and inching her way closer, hoping that they wouldn’t notice.

“She’s alive,” Cole said, noticing that there were small movements coming from her chest to indicate shallow breathing.

Cole moved in to where he could nudge her and got no response. The woman’s body remained still, looking lifeless. He nudged her again, this time harder, but still there was no response.

He decided to roll her out of the alcove that she was tucked into. Once he had her out and her face was clearly visible, it was easy to tell that the woman was in her fifties, if not sixties. She appeared to be unconscious, and with the little bit of checking that Cole did, she did not appear to have any highly visible bite marks.

“I think she ran out of water,” Cole said. “She’s dehydrated, lips cracked, skin dry.”

“Let’s get her to the doc,” Roy said, turning to head back to the Jeep, feeling a sense of urgency in acting quickly on her behalf.

Cole decided to take a chance on her not biting him, should she be infected, and scooped her up in his arms. The woman was smaller than Amanda and weighed less than her too. It was easy for him to carry her back to the Jeep in his arms.

Sam had already tucked herself into the tight squeeze of a spot in the backseat, and Roy had started the engine by the time that Cole had returned, carrying the woman.

Cole held her while he negotiated moving back into the passenger seat, before Roy quickly spun a U-turn with the Jeep and began bumping back over the rough road, as fast as he dared without jostling the woman too much.

At one point on the return trip, the woman came too long enough to open her eyes and clutch Cole’s arm before she passed out again. Cole worried that that was perhaps a death throe until he saw her rib cage begin to move again with her breath.

Back at The Trench, it was Sam and Roy that laid the rails down, while Cole stayed seated with the woman in his arms.

“I hope she makes it,” Sam said, moving quickly to get her rail laid out. “Anyone with a name like that has to be cool.”

“I hope she makes it too, regardless of her name,” Roy said, moving to return to the vehicle, instructing Sam to remain and do her best to obscure some of the tire prints and pick up the rails once they were over.

“Anything?” Roy asked as he pushed the stick in gear.

“No, nothing since she grabbed me,” Cole said, eyeing the woman and hoping that she wouldn’t die right here in his arms.

Cole had begun to sweat profusely from where their body heat had combined, and he worried that this would make things worse for her. She needed to be cooled down and not heated up by someone else’s body heat.

It seemed to the trio that the remainder of the trip was taking forever as they made their way back to the lower parking section of their camp. But when they did get back, instead of stopping at the lower section, Roy downshifted into first gear and drove the Jeep straight up the incline and into their camp.

Jason heard the vehicle approaching first and yelled for someone to go and check it out. Both Amanda and Maryanne were dashing for the edge of the hill to see who and what was coming at them. They were both simultaneously relieved to see that it was their own Jeep but also alarmed that it must be an emergency that had prompted them to drive the distance instead of walking it.

Cole was the first one to open his door, as Roy had to stop the vehicle, put it in gear, set the emergency brake, and shut it off. Maryanne pushed past Amanda to get to the open door and took some of the woman’s weight off of Cole long enough for him to get out safely without dumping her out of his arms.

“Follow me,” Maryanne said, hustling toward her foam mat that was lying under the tarp in the shade.

“She only regained conscious once, and that was only for a second or two,” Cole said.

Roy and Sam trailed after them, anxious to know if the woman could be saved.

“I wish I had sent a search party over this morning,” Amanda said, knowing that she had been watching the vultures circling for hours now.

Nobody paid any attention to Amanda’s comment, as all eyes were on Maryanne and the woman that they had found.

“She’s desperately dehydrated,” Maryanne said, after a cursory examination. “Cody, you know where I stashed the fluids?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cody said, eager to be of service.

Cody dashed to the small hole in the earth that Maryanne had dug to store the fluid bags in, covering them with a cloth. The doctor had been worried that the extreme desert temperatures would make the fluids unusable because they would be too hot to administer, so she had dug a hole to keep them in the dirt where they would be much cooler if needed. That had turned out, on two occasions now, to be a wise decision.

Maryanne had some trouble finding a vein in the woman’s arm, so she chose to use a vein that was readily apparent along the top of the woman’s frail-looking right hand.

“There,” Maryanne said, standing and working to attach the bag to one of the tent poles that held the tarp up. “That’s the first step. Now, how about all of you give us some privacy, and I’ll see if she has any bites anywhere on her, and I’ll sponge her down.”

Roy moved off toward the Jeep, wanting to get it back down the hill. Sam opted to go with him. Amanda moved back to her mat, and Cole went to find a bucket that he and Cody could use to wash up with. But when Cody went to follow his father, Maryanne called him back.

“If you really want to learn to be a doctor, you stay,” she said, eyeing the boy to get his reaction.

“Sure,” Cody said, looking interested in staying to help.

Cole said nothing and took his bucket of water down the hill. His son had never seen any parts of the body that weren’t on a man, so he figured that this might be interesting, but Maryanne was right; if the boy wanted to learn medicine, there would be no time to start like right now. On second thought, Cole imagined that perhaps the subject had been covered in school, if so, Cody had said nothing about it.

Cole had come to the conclusion that he would need to allow these people to help him raise his son, if they were to stay. It was far too close knit a group to allow for anything else, and though he hated to relinquish control, of any kind, he had begun the process of being okay with it. If there was ever a group of people that he could trust to help him raise his son, this was it.

As it turned out, Cole had nothing to be concerned about. Maryanne was very conscientious and left the woman wearing her bra and underwear. She instructed Cody to begin wetting down her hair and face in an effort to cool her, while she began examining the unconscious body for any sign that she may have been bitten.

After close scrutiny, Maryanne determined that the woman was bite free and that her primary and maybe only problem was that she suffered from severe dehydration, and that could still kill her. This diagnosis and prognosis, she explained to Cody.

“In the hospitals, fluids were administered regularly to people that had experienced many types of problems,” Maryanne was saying to Cody. “But your challenge, as a doctor in today’s world, will be a lack of proper supplies to care for your patients. We are low on fluids now and will try to cool her with water and rubbing alcohol so that she doesn’t require any more intravenous fluids.”

“Rubbing alcohol hurts when you put it on a cut,” Cody said.

“Yes, it does,” Maryanne said, before smiling. “But I can’t see where she’s cut anywhere, so I don’t think it will hurt her. Can you go get the rubbing alcohol for me?”

“Sure,” Cody said, popping up easily.

At his age, he was spry and had no problem moving around fluidly even after having been down on his hands and knees in the dirt—whereas, for Maryanne, it would have been much more of an effort if she had needed to go and get it herself. She decided that she very much liked having a doctor’s assistant.

“It’s in the box that’s . . .” Maryanne began to say.

“I know,” Cody said, already laying his hands on one of the bottles of it. “I checked out all the medical supplies earlier, you know, to be well-informed.”

“Good for you. Can you bring us two bottles of it?” Maryanne asked, before getting her focus back to the woman.

Amanda had decided that this was as good a time as any to change back into her own clothes. She was right; it had taken no time at all for them to dry on the rock, and they were both dry and stiff when she went to grab them. With Cody’s back turned to the woman that he was helping with, Amanda changed quickly into her clothes.

“Do you mind if I use some of this water to wash some clothes?” Amanda asked, noticing that she and Cody had been busy, and there was a lot more usable water at the ready now.

“Yes, that’s fine, just save enough for drinking and fixing dinner, washing dishes, and such,” Maryanne said, looking up.

Amanda not only washed one more pair of pants and a T-shirt for herself, along with a pair of underwear, but she also washed the clothes of Maryanne’s that she had just taken off. She figured that after such a grueling day, Maryanne would appreciate having a fresh change of clothes, either tonight or in the morning.

In part, Amanda wanted to do something because she wasn’t accustomed to being inactive. But also, she felt guilty that she had waited so long to draw attention to the circling birds. It seemed that had she said something earlier, the woman would have had more of a fighting chance. Guilt weighed heavily on her as she spread the washed clothes out on the rock. It did not matter that she had been the only one at all to even notice the birds, nor did it matter that had she not been here, no one would have gone over there. The only thing that mattered to Amanda was that she had not done anything about it right away.

“I wouldn’t be beating myself up about it if I were you,” said Jason, having astutely read her thoughts.

“I feel real bad about waiting so long to get anybody to do something about it,” Amanda said, coming to sit in one of the folding chairs beside him.

“You know, if you hadn’t have noticed those birds, she would have died for sure. At least she’s got a chance because of you. I saw the vultures circling, but it didn’t register as something that I needed to concern myself with. But to you, it did. You should be giving yourself props right now, instead of bashing yourself over it.”

Amanda sighed, and then was quiet, while weighing out the words that he had just spoken to see if they had merit. She should have known that they did, considering the source. When she had finished contemplating it, she decided that he was right.

“Her eyes are open,” Cody said, in a squeal that sounded like it had come from a girl, because he had not reached the age that his voice would have matured—especially given all the malnutrition that he had recently suffered.