The day after: An apocalyptic morning (168 page)

              "Leave your gun here," Jessica said, looking at Madeline again. "You won't be needing it in the laundry room."

              Madeline unsnapped the .45 she carried from its holster and removed it. She tossed it down onto Jessica's desk where it landed with a clunk. "You're making a big mistake," she said.

              "Oh, I don't think so," Jessica replied icily. "I don't think so at all."

              The pain was certainly there, a deep, constant throb that pulsed up and down his leg rhythmically, as regular as a ticking clock or a beating heart. But it was not nearly as deep, as gripping as it had been in the helicopter or in the bed the previous night. It would seem that Renee, the former family practitioner who was now a general surgeon, had done something right in there. Of course he had no way of knowing if that was true or not. He could not move his left leg, not even the tiniest inch. The entire thing, from just below the pelvis to the bottom of his ankle, was strapped into a very improvised brace made from metal poles that looked like they'd been taken from a child's swing set. These poles were held together with flexible aluminum straps of the sort that held an automatic garage door opener on its mounting. If Skip tried to move his lower leg at all, it didn't budge. He could lift it slightly upward by lifting with his upper thigh muscles but the entire leg came up with it when he did this. Renee and her assistants had basically immobilized the leg into a straight position.

              It was about an hour since he'd awakened from the anesthesia he'd been given for the surgical procedure. He was back in the same room that he'd spent the previous day in with the same roommates, although Sarah was looking a little livelier on this day. His throat was dry and scratchy and hurt like fire when he tried to swallow - a result of the breathing tube that Renee had placed in his trachea while he'd been out. His mind had been very cloudy at first - indeed it took him more than fifteen minutes to remember where he was and what had happened to him - but now his thinking, such as it was, was pretty much back to normal. Jennifer, the nurse, had given him a shot of morphine a little while after he'd awakened and had told him that the surgery had gone well, but other than that he had talked to no one yet.

              "How are you doing?" a female voice, approaching from behind, enquired of him. He recognized it as Renee.

              He looked up at her, seeing the bags under her eyes that came from being almost constantly awake for the last 30 hours. He could smell cigarette smoke on her, as if she'd just stepped out for one. "I don't know," he said pleasantly. "How am I doing?"

              She grabbed a rolling chair from next to Susan's bed and brought it over, plopping herself down into it. She looked at him. "You're kneecap is not quite in the same position it used to be in," she told him. "The underlying bone structure was pretty much mangled and I had to fit it in there the best I could. It kind of leans to the right a little and is tilted upward on the left."

              "I see," Skip said, although he really couldn't. "So you're saying that my leg will be kind of funny looking?"

              "That's right," she said. "It'll be kind of funny looking and it will be perhaps an inch shorter than the right leg. That bullet smashed through the lower part of your femur and the upper part of your tibia and fibula. It also cut through some of the tendons that hold your knee together."

              "So will I be able to walk?" he asked her.

              She gave him a half-smile. "I think so," she said. "It'll take you a little getting used to and you'll almost certainly have a pronounced limp for the rest of your life, but I think that you'll be able to recover most of the functions of that leg."

              He gave her a full smile. "That's really good to hear, doc," he told her. "Thank you."

              She shrugged. "I did what I could," she said. "Back in the old days, before the comet, I could've sent you to an orthopedic surgeon who could've fixed you up so that you were better than you had been before. But we seem to be all out of orthopedic surgeons these days."

              "I'm sure you did the best you could," Skip told her. "Really, I'm just grateful that there was doctor to work on me and the others at all. You saved most of us, doc. Sarah sure as hell wouldn't have made it without you and I probably wouldn't have either. At the very least I would've been bedridden forever."

              "Well, I'm not saying for sure that you won't be yet," she said. "Keep in mind that I did an orthopedic rotation once when I was back in medical school. That was the extent of my training for you and for Susan over there. I put your leg back together with some pretty strange things - things that were never meant to be put into a human body. I put screws from the hardware store into your femur and tibia. I cut the damaged bone away with a pair of bolt cutters from Frank Edwards' garage. I used a Makita reversible drill to screw in the screws. I'm telling you, I felt like I was in woodshop back in high school instead of operating on a human being."

              "But it worked didn't it?" Skip asked, actually finding it somewhat amusing that she'd put ordinary wood screws into his leg with a Makita.

              "I'm pretty sure it did," she agreed. "And I sterilized them of course, if you were wondering about that."

              "Actually, I wasn't. But thanks for letting me know anyway. So how long will I be in this get-up?"

              "Six weeks minimum," she told him. "Probably more. I don't have an X-ray machine to check on the progress of the mend so we'll have to play it safe. After it looks like its healing up, you'll be able to try walking on it and getting it back up to strength. You're going to lose muscle tone while you're convalescing. And of course you're going to have to take Coumadin for at least a month."

              "Do you have that much Coumadin?" he asked her. "We used up our entire town's supply treating Sherrie's leg."

              "Well, we had a pharmacy available to us so we have a fairly good supply of it," Renee told him. "But we'll probably exhaust a good portion of that treating all of the bone injuries that resulted from the war."

              Skip wondered if she was hinting at something. She seemed to have something that she wanted to discuss but it didn't seem to be a trading issue - at least not exactly. "What can we do about that?" he asked carefully.

              "We need to get more medical supplies," Renee said simply.

              "Look," Skip said, "I'm sorry that we've burdened you with our wounded, really I am. But..."

              "No," Renee said, shaking her head. "You misunderstand me. I'm not trying to point out a debt that you owe to us. Not at all."

              "No?"

              "No," she said. "While it's true we have treated your wounded here in our town, using our supplies, I am not trying to hint to you that you now owe us something in return. On the contrary, I believe - and Pat shares this attitude I'm sure - that it is you that did us a favor. You fought the war. You sacrificed the people to beat those fascists in Auburn. Now we won't have to deal with them in the future. If you would've lost I'm sure they eventually would have worked their way down to us at some point."

              "I suppose you're right," Skip said.

              "So you see," she said, "treating your wounded and using our supplies to do it with was the least we could do. In truth, I'm somewhat ashamed that we didn't send troops down your way to help you out. We had volunteers you know."

              "No," he said, a little surprised. "I didn't know."

              "More than fifty of us, men and women alike, volunteered to take up arms for your cause. It was only the logistics of getting them there that prevented us from making an official offer. In a way I feel like we were the United States during the early part of World War II and you folks over in Garden Hill were the Russians or the English. We supplied the ammunition and the guns for you and you did the killing of the enemy and the sacrificing of your own people."

              "It's over now," Skip said, wondering where all of this was leading. "We've beat them back and they shouldn't be a threat to anyone again for a long time. Don't let your actions or lack of actions keep you awake at night."

              "Yes," Renee said, "this battle is over. But what if there are more? Don't tell me you haven't considered that possibility."

              He sighed a little, shifting his position carefully on the bed. "I try not to think about that," he said. "But, since it is my job, I do anyway. Yes, of course its possible that there are other Auburn-type groups out there. I like to think that most groups of survivors will form up much like we have or like you have, but I know enough about human nature to know that there will always be Auburns."

              "And one of those Auburns might turn their forces loose upon us if they know of our existence," Renee said.

              "They might," he said.

              "So what we - that is both of our towns - need to do, is make sure that we're as prepared for that eventuality as we can be. That means we need more ammunition, more guns, better guns, upgraded defenses, the whole nine yards."

              "Yes," Skip said. "That's only prudent."

              "And then there are the medical supplies," she went on. "We need more antibiotics, more surgical instruments, more pain killers and anesthetic supplies. In short, we need to find a hospital or a medical supply warehouse and raid it for as much as we can get. Hell, if I were just able to get my hands on a damn ultrasound machine I would be able to do so much with it."

              "So what are you saying, exactly?" Skip wanted to know.

              "I'm saying that our community has something that you need - a doctor, medical knowledge. Your community has something that we need - a pilot and an aircraft and military knowledge. We worked together during this crisis and utilized both of our resources to the advantage of both. I think that extending that relationship now that there is no crisis would be even more beneficial. I believe that making some sort of cooperation and trading pact is in order."

              "Hmmm," Skip said thoughtfully. He liked the sound of it. "I'm not a town leader, Renee," he told her. "And I don't have any sort of authority to make deals or even propose them."

              "But you have Paul's ear, don't you?"

              "That I do," he said. "And for what its worth, I think you're right. I think cooperation is in both of our best interests."

              "Cooperation," she said, "and maybe even a merger eventually."

              "A merger? You mean, we join together under one system, in one place?"

              "That's exactly what I mean," she said. "There's strength in numbers, is there not? And it's much easier to defend four hundred people if they're in one place instead of two. My thought is that we think about moving all of your people down to here. You'd give up your bridge position and your nicer homes, but you'd also have the advantage of being located next to the water access for fishing and on lower ground for when the weather gets colder - because it will get colder soon. My guess is that Garden Hill is sitting on the location of a future glacier."

              "My guess is that you're right," Skip answered. "Maggie - she's a friend of Christine and Paula's - has a meteorology degree. She says the same thing. That the warmer weather we've been experiencing is a result of heat released by the comet and trapped by the cloud cover. She also says that its gradually cooling and that more than likely we're in the beginning stages of a new ice age. The glacier will probably reach here eventually as well."

              "About twenty or thirty years after it swallows up Garden Hill," Renee countered.

              "Again, true," he conceded. "I'm not really sure how the townspeople will take the idea of moving out of their homes though. That would be something that would take a lot of discussion at a lot of community meetings. And then there's the logistics of doing it. How would we get all of our people from there to here? It would be quite a walk - especially with supplies."

              "You'd need a bigger aircraft," she said. She looked at him pointedly. "Do you know how to fly airplanes as well as helicopters?"

              He smiled. "Why yes I do," he confirmed. "And I just happen to know where there's a nice twin-engine Cessna as well. If I could get that thing running and figure out some way to land it both here and there, it could haul ten people over at once, or it could carry five or six thousand pounds of cargo."

              "So you see?" she said brightly. "Two heads are better than one. Already we've come up with a plan."

              "Again," he reminded her, "I'm just a grunt. I have no actual authority to agree or disagree."

              "It just something to think about," Renee said. "And something to talk to Paul about. Promise me that you will?"

              "I promise," he assured her.

              Early the next morning Jack landed the helicopter once again in the parking lot of the El Dorado Hills elementary school. He was getting quite good at the mechanics of flying now that he'd accumulated almost five solo hours and the touchdown was smooth and right on the mark. Shortly after his landing Skip and Susan were loaded into the back along with a large supply of antibiotics, painkillers, and anti-coagulant drugs. Hector, who had finally been deemed well enough to leave (actually he should have stayed a little longer but he didn't want to miss the burial ceremony) was given the honor of sitting in the front.