August 16, 2010
Shane wakes in the morning feeling overheated despite the cooler temps nightfall brought with the still open windows. His body aches all over, and he realizes that the infection he's been dreading is taking hold on a larger scale than just the stab wound itself. He manages to sit up from where he slept on the living room sectional. Sophia's still asleep, curled up nearly in a fetal position on the smaller side of the big couch.
While they've got thermometers in their supplies now, thanks to his raid of the pharmacy, he heads for the bathroom instead. Avoiding the answer for a minute, he takes a leak and washes his hands from the gallon-sized pitcher they filled up last night before he turned off the generator to spare diesel and noise.
He bites the bullet and sticks the damn digital thermometer in his mouth. While he waits on the beep, he touches the bandaging gently. Even that light touch hurts almost more than the night he received the wound.
The beep of the thermometer is too damn cheery for the news it brings.
101.4.
Not crazy high yet, but not where he wants it to be when he's still in strange territory with a half-trained girl.
Back in the living room, he finds the pharmacy bag and takes the cipro and the ketorolac. He remembers Sophia's caution that the PDR says it's a short-term painkiller and hopes this infection doesn't outlast the safe period to take it.
Sophia's awake now, blinking at him sleepily and that tugs at his emotions further. Yesterday, she woke so quickly he hated the reminder of her fearful past. Today, she's slower to wake, because she's decided he isn't a threat to her, he thinks.
He can't help laughing at the bird's nest that the new haircut descended into while she was sleeping. "Go take a look in the mirror, kiddo."
She stumbles by, and he laughs again when he hears, "Oh my God, I look like I was electrocuted."
He hears a splash of water before she returns, her hair firmly wet down. "It's going to be like this every morning, isn't it?" she asks.
"Probably. Shorter hair gets a bit wilder when you sleep than long hair."
"How are you feeling?" she asks, looking at his chest. He didn't have her help the night before with changing the bandage, not wanting her to see where he had to clean off the discharge that is developing now.
"Like crap on a cracker." No sense in outright lying to her.
Sophia sighs and hands him a bottle of Gatorade she pilfered from the pantry. "Do you think the antibiotic is helping?"
"Probably. I don't think I would be upright if it wasn't."
"Alright." She leaves the room, going down the hall to the bedrooms they avoided to get better airflow in the living room. He hears her banging around a bit before she returns down the hall with a stack of textbooks.
He has to give her points for being more nosy or more observant than he is, because her haul is a stack of nursing textbooks, from what he can tell.
"I think the girl was going to nursing school," Sophia says. "She's got a handbook on the desk for the community college in town."
Nursing textbooks are bound to be better detailed than his Red Cross training, so he takes one book while Sophia tackles another after retrieving a bottle of Gatorade for herself. The urgency he feels to get back home is outweighed by the potential for knowledge right here in front of them.
"Here." Sophia slaps the book she has down on top of his, pointing. "What color is it?"
He skims the text and grimaces. "Red and yellow both, last night. I cleaned off the discharge before I rebandaged."
She surprises him by reaching for the bandage, but something in how her movements are jerky makes him allow it. She puts the pressure bandage on the table, eyeing the medical tape before taking a deep breath and peeling it away.
The mess he saw last night hasn't improved. The edges of the wound are inflamed and red, with a thick discharge making for a truly distasteful sight. She flinches, but turns back to the book.
"We need to irrigate it again, it says."
It's going to hurt like utter hell, even with the ketorolac setting in, but he nods. She grabs the supplies, including some of her bottles of boiled water, and he stretches out on a towel on the living room rug.
It feels precisely like he expects to have water poured into the wound. He's shaking and feeling the need to vomit by the time she stops with the water. But it's not over yet, because now she's cleaning the edges, wiping away what clung to the edges of the wound even with the irrigation.
Sophia looks distinctly weepy by the time he can really focus on her, but she's soldiering through, patting the area around the wound dry. She tears open one of the boxes from the pharmacy with an abrupt motion, fishing out one of the individual packages.
"The book says…" Her voice cracks and she has to try again. "The book says an alginate dressing might help."
He finds his voice. "You're doing good, Sophia."
She nods, biting her lip, and gently places the dressing on his chest. She covers it with a different type of gauze pad, before taping everything down. It takes him a minute to sit back up, because the current sensation feels like she poured boiling water over his chest and followed it up with hot coals.
"I'm gonna go…"
He makes it to the bathroom before he vomits, thankful all he's had today is the Gatorade so far. He isn't sure how much of the medication he's processed.
"Shane?"
He raises his head up to peer at her and she's holding one of the medication bottles and a water bottle. "Maybe you should take the other antibiotic? The PDR says it treats skin infections too."
At this point, he's willing to try it, so he rinses his mouth with the bottle she offers and takes the pill. He maneuvers to his feet and flushes the toilet. "I really want to get on the road, kiddo."
If he's going to be sick - or worse - he wants to be in his home, where he knows where everything is, and he's reasonably certain Sophia will be safe.
It takes them over three hours to reach the King County border, since they leave a few more messages along the way. He's still running a fever, but he takes the highway into the county seat. When he pulls up outside Rick's old house, he feels a tug of nostalgia for how many times he pulled up here in his Jeep.
"I doubt they're back here, but in hopes they will come by, let's leave a message."
Sophia nods. Her face shows the worry that's been growing all day, little side looks toward the distortion of his T-shirt from the bandaging beneath. He squeezes her hand.
"C'mon, kiddo. Just this one stop and then we'll go somewhere I'm not driving anymore." Constantly irritating the wound is likely part of the infection, he thinks.
Weapons in hand, they advance up the concrete steps, but there's nothing in the end. Just an unlocked door and an empty house. It looks much like it did the day Shane scrambled to get Lori and Carl into his Jeep and away, to the promised safety of Atlanta.
The wave of grief that hits him nearly puts him on his knees, until a small hand curls into his. Anchored back to today and dragged out of the memory, he takes a deep breath.
"Thank you." He barely recognizes his voice as his own.
Sophia nods and doesn't let go, even as he takes a seat at the kitchen table and tries to reorient himself. She lays her gun on the table, since he has hold of her right hand, and fiddles with the damn weird salt and pepper shakers still sitting on the table like the Grimes family will come home any minute now.
"It's a pretty house," she says finally.
Shane coughs in an attempt to laugh. "Yeah, it is."
They were happy enough here, he thinks, even when Rick and Lori were at odds with each other more often than not the past couple of years. Sitting here he can see the sink Rick broke and he fixed, which is one of thousands of memories of time spent here. He takes a deep breath.
"Guess we should leave a note. Maybe more than one, in case they don't check all the rooms."
She nods and finally lets his hand go, going to take a magnetic notepad off the fridge. She pulls a pen from her pocket. "What should it say?"
It's a good question, since so many of their messages were about direction and getting to King County itself. "How about we say, 'Christmas comes every Sunday in King County'."
"Will he understand what that means? Because I don't."
"Hopefully. There's a Christmas tree farm on the way to my place. First time we ever took Carl out there to cut a tree after they bought this house, he said he wanted Christmas to come every Sunday." Five years ago, that was. Seems like a lifetime ago.
She writes out the message several times, including one final time that she leaves on the pad and sticks it back to the fridge. "Where should I leave these?"
Shane gets to his feet and leads her around the house, tucking the notes in places Rick might look, if he ever comes home again. When they leave, he leaves the door unlocked after he shuts it, because it would suck for them to come home and have to break the glass. He doubts anyone held onto house keys this long.
Back in the Bug, Shane tries to remember what house Rick said the man who saved him was squatting in, but he can't recall the neighbor's name. He circles a couple of the blocks near Rick's house, but nothing stands out.
"Don't think we're going to find him based on a conversation I barely remember," he tells Sophia.
"And he might think we're not friendly and hide, if he has a kid with him, right?"
She has a very good point there. He certainly would avoid strangers, even if they were driving a Pepto-pink VW. He gives up on the search and heads out of town, dodging occasional abandoned cars and trying damned hard not to think about the people who lived here.
The walker population is fairly small, none aggressive enough to follow the Bug, and he wonders if Rick's friend is responsible. It's something he'll worry about later. They have enough supplies in the car, plus what is likely still at his house, to make it at least a month.
Jesus Christ, he needs some rest and to kick this fever.
While Highway 36 is an almost direct route, he detours just to show Sophia the Christmas tree farm. She watches the trees go by with a sigh. "I've never had a real Christmas tree before."
"Well, maybe this year will be a little different."
It's another thing to file away that this girl hasn't experienced. His own mama, poor as she was, still managed a real tree every few years. Sometimes money was too tight, and they fell back on the aging, dinky artificial tree she kept stored in a closet the rest of the year, but not always.
It earns him another of those assessing looks, but she seems satisfied with whatever she sees, because she returns to looking out the window. They reconnect to the highway and dodge around a wreck. He willfully does not concentrate on the fact that he recognizes one of the damaged vehicles.
"How much further?"
"About five miles."
She's quiet when he takes the first turn off the highway, but he gets the idea she's memorizing the route. That's good, because she needs to know where town is, if she needs to ever go without him, worst case scenario.
At the next turn, he knows he's right, because her eyes go to the street sign. It's a longer stretch of road this time, but when he slows to turn, he speaks. "This is my road. Goes a bit like a fishhook, out toward the river then back to the end."
"You live at the end?"
Shane nods. That was the lure of the place, and why he spent more than it was really worth to buy the place when it hit foreclosure after the prior tenant died and his kids didn't take up the bank note.
"Lots of woods."
"It's real private, compared to town. Everybody's got at least a few acres between them. A lot of the ones on the right side of the road have dock access to the oxbow lake or the creek that connects the lake down to the river."
He makes the big turn, the road nearly looping back on itself in the fishhook he described. There's only one more house on the right before his, and he stops in his driveway to punch in the code to the gate. He's lucky that the damn solar panel for the gate's mechanism is still working, because the gate opens slowly and he edges inside waiting to make sure it closes behind them.
The other deputies made fun of him for fencing in the little property, wondering who would travel so far out and be stupid enough to rob a county deputy at that. He didn't bother to tell them he just liked the idea that folks couldn't just drive up anytime without him knowing they were coming.
"We'll need to reinforce the fence some," he tells Sophia. "It's tall enough, but I put it in with t-posts, like the garden back at the last place. They can be pushed over, with enough force."
Only the corners and certain spots along the fence line are the big wooden posts that would stand up to a smaller herd. But for now, it should keep them safe, until he's in the shape that's needed to redo the weaker points.
"Okay. And walkers can't swim, right?"
She's not looking at the house as he pulls into one of the two parking spots underneath it. The house is raised above the potential flood level, a combination of concrete and wooden pilings that aren't the prettiest things he's ever seen, but they do their job. He's never had the water reach the house itself even if he did have to evacuate the Jeep one year when it flooded heavily.
But the fact that the house is literally above them is why Sophia's attention is on the water. Three hundred or so feet from the last of the pilings under the house is the oxbow lake that's the entire reason he bought the place.
"No, sweetheart, they cannot swim." Thank God for small favors in this fucked up world.
She opens her door and ventures out, glancing up curiously at last but looking between him and the dock. He knows there's no way there's anything between the house and the dock, so he motions her onward.
Sophia jogs down the incline, booted feet quick on the path he installed to the water. She reaches the dock and leans over one of the rails to peer down at the water for a minute, before looking around.
He wonders what she thinks of what she's seeing as she slowly turns, looking back up the hill to the house perched above her. He replaced all the timeworn old Masonite siding with wooden shake siding, staining it a color the can called smoke blue which makes it blend into the trees even in winter. The deck goes all the way around, where he ripped off the rotted original and expanded it.
Today is probably the first time he really thinks about how much the house actually fits the world they're living in. They won't have to close themselves in, between the raised house and the fence.
She's looked her fill, apparently, because she comes running back up the path. "We're going to be carrying a lot of things up, aren't we?"
"Yeah, just a little."
And the worry is back right away. "I can do that, you know. I'm strong enough."
He wants to argue the point, but he also knows doing any more damage to his chest is a stupid use of pride. "Alright. I'll go unlock the place."
Snagging the hidden key buried in the soil around a potted tree on the upper deck, he leans on the door for a minute, trying to catch his breath. When he hears her boots on the stairs, he straightens and unlocks the door.
They're home.
A/N: I feel like I should post a medical disclaimer... while I do a lot of research, there's a large part of Shane's ongoing and upcoming condition that is largely guesswork. Obviously, in a situation like this, go to the hospital, right? (I also may or may not have given in and purchased a 600-page used nursing textbook because I keep writing medical stuff... it arrives sometime next week, so I'm just kind of flying by the seat of my pants with Google on some of this.)
Things are about to get really rough for our duo.