Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) (24 page)

Bernard put his good hand on her shoulder and she looked up from her work. He stared at her for a long moment and then very deliberately nodded. Ruth tried to swallow but there was a hard, dry lump in her throat.

“But you never said anything. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Bernard just shook his head and opened his mutilated mouth. Ruth nodded but her eyes filled with tears. “You saw it?” she asked, “You saw the cure?”

He looked confused and then made a cross with his fingers again. It took Ruth a few moments to understand him. “You saw people like Father Preston? People who had recovered?” she guessed.

Bernard nodded.

“How many? How did you know they were cured?” Ruth gripped his injured fingers too tightly and he winced. She let go remembering why they were here. “Never mind,” she said, “I guess that part isn’t important. Could you find it again? The place with the cure?”

Bernard stared off into space for a long, long time. At last he made a frustrated sigh and shook his head. He pretended to punch the side of his head.

Ruth nodded sadly. “It’s gone, isn’t it? When they hurt you, you lost some memory.” She went back to concentrating on her work, her hands no longer shaking with excitement. She knew it wouldn’t have mattered. Even if she’d known back when she met Bernard, it was far too late for Charlie. And it could hardly help now. Juliana was trapped in the hospital and Ruth and Bernard would be killed on sight. But it would have made Juliana happy. And the Infected— all the ones she had killed, all the ones in the hospital— what about them? Had Father Preston been right all this time? And what they were about to do, how would she justify that if the cure were within reach? She looked up at Bernard. His eyes were filmy and unfocused and his breath labored. She knew it was the pain of his broken arm, but she couldn’t shake the image she’d had of him. He was simple. Gullible. Probably had been before the beating too. After all, he’d sent Gray to her for a bounty, hadn’t he? Maybe he imagined it. Maybe he was taken in by people that intended to take advantage of him. Maybe it was just like Gray said, a front for killing the Infected off.

By the time she’d wrapped the rest of his hand in bandages, Ruth had half convinced herself that Bernard had been wrong about the cure. But doubt still slithered through her gut. Bernard had seen what Gray was really doing, he’d known it to be wrong and tried to stop it, something even Father Preston seemed unable to realize. That wasn’t simple or gullible. She told herself to focus on the immediate problem. Time for guilt and regret later.

It was past sunset when they finally crept back out of the station, but there was nobody in sight or earshot. Ruth was worried about Juliana, but she knew the best way to help was to go on with the plan. Bernard was weak and in pain, even with the basic pain killers that had survived in the kit, but he was stable and she had let him rest for a few hours after she did what she could for him.

The plan was insane. So much had gone wrong already. She’d worn a deep, panicked rut in her mind trying to find another solution, but nothing came close. She began leading Bernard toward the harbor. It was a long way on foot, made even longer by Bernard’s injuries and Ruth’s exhaustion. She talked it through both to fill time and to try to solidify it in her own mind.

“We’re letting the Infected go, Bernard. We have to. Even with the food you saved today, they’ll starve before the end of the winter. And if we let Father Preston take them, the way he wants to, they’d end up like those two poor souls who were dragging that police car back there.” She glanced at Bernard. He seemed to be listening but his gaze was somewhere far ahead of them. “And Juliana— Juliana is very sick. She can’t take care of all of them any more. She’s going to need us to take care of her, Bernard.”

A few tears rolled down the large man’s face and he nodded but didn’t look at her. Ruth waited a few moments before continuing. “I know you are thinking of the cure, but I don’t know how to get it. We don’t have time. Juliana needs our help now and I can’t leave her to go look. We can’t take care of them anymore, but we can give them whatever chance they have left. We can let them go free where maybe they’ll live an extra couple of weeks. Who knows? Maybe they’ll wander to the place you found and someone will cure them. Maybe they’ll get lucky. At worst,they’ll die the same way they would in the hospital this winter.”

She looked up at Bernard, not sure what she was expecting to see. Judgment? Anger? Sorrow? But his face was impassive.

“But it will be dangerous for us when we release them. So we’ve got to warn everyone. Well, everyone that isn’t attacking the hospital anyway. And we have to get Juliana away. I was coming to ask you to find a boat and to get it ready. I didn’t know what Gray was going to do to you. If I’d known—”

Bernard shook his head and squeezed her shoulders.

“We’re going to find a boat together and then I will warn as many people as I can. But I don’t know how to get stores down to the boat. I had to kill the guard they left at the cottage, but I’m sure he’s been found now. Even if I could get back there without being seen, I don’t have time to make many trips back to the harbor. They’ll have figured out that I’ve escaped before long.”

Bernard let her go and stood up straight for a moment. He pointed to her and pretended he was steering with one hand.

“Do I know how to drive a boat?” Ruth guessed.

Bernard nodded.

“No. Do you?”

He shook his head.

“Ah well, no matter. We won’t be able to use a motorboat any way. I was hoping to find a sailboat. Even if we just anchor farther out in the harbor for a few weeks until things die down and then I swim back for a row boat, we should be safe. The Infected won’t be in boats.”

Bernard looked troubled but just leaned on her again as they continued. The supplies tormented Ruth. She had counted on Bernard’s help, but he was in no condition now to carry heavy loads or even to protect her while she did. She couldn’t just shove Juliana on an empty boat. She had no idea how to fish, besides the need for clean water. Her original thought had been to simply sail somewhere better. But it was a dream, not a plan. None of them knew how to work a sail boat, and even if one of them had, where were they going to go? Everywhere would be as bad. Maybe they would get lucky and find easy pickings somewhere empty or maybe they’d run into a gang worse than Gray’s. Or a pack of feral dogs. Or just empty, cleaned out homes for miles and miles.

But it was the only plan she had. Bernard hadn’t had time to think of one at all, and she knew Juliana expected them all to die in the onslaught between the angry Congregation and the freed Infected. Ruth was stubbornly hopeful, so she stuck to the plan even though she knew it had already gone seriously awry.

It was about midnight when they reached the docks and both of them were stumbling with exhaustion. A quarter moon covered the rotting boards with pale shadows, but it was still far too dark to find what they needed. Like it or not, Ruth would have to wait until morning to return to Juliana. The area was strange to her, and she was wary about moving too far from the docks now that they were here. She helped Bernard sit on a metal bench while she and the dog limped down the pier to find some shelter. She kept a close eye on the dog, but it sniffed its way down the road, unconcerned. Ruth relaxed a little in her strange surroundings. She settled on an old restaurant at the far end of the docks. It was thickly carpeted and still dry, its windows still intact. She helped Bernard inside and lit a few of the candles that were scattered over the tables. She pushed the furniture back. Bernard clumsily folded old tablecloths with one hand into lumpy pillows. Ruth took a quick glance out the front door again to be sure they hadn’t been followed and then collapsed next to Bernard and the dog.

“It’ll be okay,” she said into the dark. She smiled and turned to look at Bernard, to make him feel better. But he was already asleep. The circuit of worry sparked one more time in her head. “It’ll be okay,” she said again. The panic faded and she dropped into a deep sleep.

Chapter 22

The morning sparked like fire on the glass door of the restaurant. Ruth squinted at it in silent protest. Bernard was still sleeping heavily but the dog thumped its tail as Ruth sat up.

“Want to go out, boy?” she whispered. The dog’s tail wagged faster. Ruth stood up and opened the door for it. She would let Bernard sleep and heal while she found a boat. She rubbed her eyes and stretched as she walked out into the restaurant’s weedy parking lot.

Then she took a long look around the harbor. The sight made her heart sink even further. Half a dozen boats sat in the water near enough for her to reach. A few of them listed to one side. One of them was mostly sunk, its prow poking through the gray water and crusted with green growth. A few others had snapped masts that trailed into the water behind them, still clinging by a wooden shard. A steel tanker had ground itself on the beach and lay blooming bloody rust pits in the sun. None of them was usable.

Ruth had only been to the docks a few times as a little girl, but she remembered there being dozens and dozens of boats, large and small. She tried not to panic. Where would they have gone? Looters? Maybe some, but she doubted they were all yacht experts. She had an idea that a lot of people fled the city in boats during the Plague, thinking it would protect them, but they were already infected. It occurred to her that the Plague had hit hardest in December and January. Most of the boats would have been stored for the winter. Ruth felt calmer.

She walked down the long harbor looking for a storage facility. There would have to be dozens. She decided to just work her way down the harbor until she found a boat that she could slide into the water. The first place she came to had dozens of boats sitting in racks or covered in dusty cloth. But even the smallest were too large for her to push herself. They’d been designed for trucks to carry. She wandered through the dim building peering carefully at each boat, tugging on the trailer hitches to see if they would roll even the slightest bit.

She thought her luck had come through at last when she found an electric forklift at the very back near the manager’s office. Spare batteries for it were neatly stacked against the wall in a “charged” shelf and a “depleted” shelf. She didn’t think the one in the lift would work, but she climbed in anyway and turned the key. She was shocked when it turned over. Ruth had never been inside a forklift. She tried to ease forward but she lurched a little to the left. She twisted the wheel, but it turned slowly instead of the way a car would. She looked worriedly down at the panel trying to find out how much battery she had left, but she couldn’t tell which dial it was. She shrugged. No good worrying about the battery if she couldn’t figure out how to drive the thing. She took a slow practice loop around the edge of the building. After a few rough patches she felt confident enough to try the forks. She lifted an old desk that was sitting in the back. When she was satisfied she knew what she was doing, she switched the lift off and got out. She scanned the aisles until she found a boat that would be large enough for all three of them. Or at least, that’s what she hoped.

It took another forty-five minutes of tense tries and a battery change to get the boat out. She inched it out without dropping it, though, and backed slowly out onto the road. The boat was too large to see going forward, so the forklift bumped up over the curb and across the road, sliding toward the water. She let the water come up to her waist before dropping the forks. The boat bobbed on the water, but the lift shorted out. She swam the few feet to a ladder on the boat’s side. Excited, she pulled the covering off as quickly as she could. Before it was halfway off, she jumped in and tried to use the wheel to steer her toward the restaurant and the docks. She banged her head on the stored mast. The boat turned, but it made no advance. She let go and the boat sat in a bare foot of water, its bottom making dull clunks as it scraped the rocks. She pulled the cover off and let it fall into the water. She tried to pull the mast up, but it was a tangle of wires. She was taking a close look at the pins meant to hold the mast in place when the boat finally drifted far enough to move freely. The front tilted quickly and then the boat started tilting sideways. Ruth clambered higher up the deck, but she could hear water rushing in. She watched in dismay as the boat sank, inch by inch until it hit the bottom again and straightened out, no better than a jagged stone sticking out of the shallow water. She jumped off and swam back to shore, the water as bitter as her mood. Bernard had come to find her. He waded partway into the water to help, but she waved him back.

“It’s no use,” she wheezed as the ocean dripped from her onto the pavement, “Everything has gone wrong. Every inch I gain is countered and beaten back. We have to find another way. Unless we can carry it and paddle it, we won’t be able to use it. Which leaves— what? A dinghy? A canoe, if we got lucky?”

Bernard suddenly brightened. He waved for her to follow him. “You found a canoe?” she asked, but he just shrugged. He led her back toward the restaurant and past it, where the harbor widened and the docks collapsed from their rotting wooden stilts. The water was as empty as the richer side, but pulled up on the shore were dozens of small humps hidden by tattered plastic tarps and rotting nets.

“These will be rotten Bernard— nobody has cared for them in years.”

Bernard shook his head and walked on. There was a huge stone building set back from the shore. Its back to the ocean, its base was still covered in green seaweed that the high tide washed up. Bernard went around to the front. The metal sign in front had fallen sideways and been half eaten by the salt air, but Ruth could still see “Maritime Museum” fairly clearly. Her temper improved immediately. She followed the dog and Bernard inside the dark, solid building.