A/N: POV shifts to Sophia for the next few chapters.
August 16, 2010
Sophia checks over the car one last time for anything she's left behind. It feels like she's made a million trips up the stairs to the raised house, but she knows realistically, it's more like a dozen. There's nothing left in the car, so she locks it and pockets the keys.
Back upstairs, she surveys the bags upon bags of supplies on the deck and takes a deep breath. She told him she was strong enough to do this, and she will. He trusts her and believes her, and no matter how much he's hiding it, he's sick in a way that terrifies her to think about it. Working means she doesn't think as much, so she picks up several bags and moves inside.
"There's power?" she says, blinking a little when she sees the light in the fridge where he's looking inside and checking a few items. After the generators at the two farms, she shouldn't be surprised, but she is.
"Yeah. Got solar put in after a big ice storm a few years back knocked power out for a week. Still paying that damn installation off, actually."
She puts her first load of bags down near the fridge. "Guess that's a bill you won't miss, huh?"
It makes him laugh, so she smiles, even if he doesn't see it because he's moved down the hallway to check on the rest of the house. He scared her sometimes, just a little, at the quarry, because he was big and loud, like her daddy. But the longer she watched him with Carl, the more she realized that was about all the similarities between the two men.
At the time, him wailing on Ed like he did scared her until later, once her mama wasn't crying so much anymore. It's the first time she ever believed anyone could put a stop to her daddy's temper.
Opening the fridge herself, she looks to see what's already in there. There's actually a bottle of orange juice, still sealed, in a half-full fridge. She's guessing when he left here, he probably wasn't expecting to be gone a long time or need refrigerated food.
She opens the juice after checking the date on the bottle and pours them both glasses. It's been long enough since his last dose of both meds to take some more, so she sets all the prescription bottles and a thermometer on the table next to his glass. Taking a big drink of hers, glad it's cold after drinking warm bottles of water for weeks, she goes back outside to keep moving their bags inside.
Shane's back in the kitchen now, although it's really one big room. The door from the side deck where the stairs are comes in at the living room. There's a dining area on the right, on the side of the house toward the road, and the kitchen's on that side too. She can see the hallway by the kitchen, leading to whatever bedrooms the house has.
Due to the light at the far end of the hallway, she can see a big circular fan sitting and running near the other door to the outside with a box fan behind it. It looks like they're facing out the screen door though.
The part that's really worrying her is that Shane is actually sitting down at the table. He's never been a still person in her experience, always moving. Now he's just sitting there, drinking the orange juice methodically. His fingers on his free hand are still, not tapping or moving, and worst of all, he's quiet.
Sophia doesn't comment on it, because talking about it makes it more real, and she's just not ready for that reality check yet.
Once everything's inside except the bags of charcoal and the grill, she leaves the door open and raises the glass in the screen door. She remembers some science class about air flow, so if the fans are blowing out, they'll need air coming in, right?
"Should I open windows?" she asks.
It startles him out of whatever funk he's fallen into, and he jumps a little and gives her a tired smile. "Yeah. A/C won't run with just the solar power. You can turn on the fans in rooms we'll use. First bedroom on the left for you."
He seems fairly listless, so she goes around opening the windows. Just getting the lake side ones in the living room changes the entire feel of the room. As hot as the August day is, she can feel the cooler air from the lake she noticed earlier at the dock. She finishes opening all the windows in the living room and dining area, before moving down the hallway.
The bedroom he assigned to her has windows facing the lake too. It's got a black metal-framed bunk bed with a full-size futon on the bottom. From a couple of comics and old toys scattered about, she bets this was probably where Carl slept if he stayed over at Shane's house. She raises both windows and turns on the round fan. It's pointed at the wall, which is a little weird, but as the air bounces back at her, she understands.
Across from the bedroom is a set of double folding doors she figures hide a washer and dryer, so she skips that. The next door on the left is a tiny, tiny bathroom with just enough room for a tub and shower combo, a toilet, and sink. It's breathtakingly hot, so she turns on the exhaust fan and leaves the door open.
The next room she thinks is probably Shane's, if nothing else because it has its own bathroom, and she would want one that looked on the lake if she owned a house like this. She turns on the bathroom's exhaust fan and opens both of the lakeside windows before looking around while she enjoys the feel of the breeze coming inside.
There's a queen-sized bed with an emerald green quilt under the windows on the side wall. Opening that pair of windows means having to climb onto the bed because she isn't tall enough to reach otherwise. It gives her a good view of a gun safe mounted to the side of the nightstand closest to the lake side windows.
She files that little bit of information away and turns on the fan like the other bedroom has. The fan half blocks the folding closet door closest to the outer wall, so she has to close the doors. She guesses he left them ajar when he packed to leave. There's not a lot of clothes out of the closet, and she can see several uniforms hanging in the plastic from the dry cleaners.
Out of habit, she picks up the discarded uniform in the floor and drapes it on the side of the hamper. The heavier police utility belt she dumps on the top of the dresser. Last thing they need is him tripping over it. When she first saw him on that highway before the quarry, he wasn't wearing a uniform. He must have changed when he stopped by to pack necessities and hurried, because several of the dresser drawers are not shut all the way.
Across the hall, the corner room is set up as a home gym. She ignores the equipment to open the four windows. He said to only turn on fans in the rooms they'll be using, so she leaves this one alone and pushes the door open in the last room, the one between the kitchen and corner bedroom.
Sophia thinks her mama would call this a junk room. There's some organization of it, or maybe there was before Shane tried to evacuate to Atlanta. She gets the windows open and sighs at the mess. With the random pieces of outdoor equipment for camping and hunting, she figures he doesn't store that stuff in a shed or the garage like her daddy did. He must have really been in a hurry too, because the big cabinet-style gun safe in this room is open.
She's surprised when she gets back to the kitchen that Shane's roused enough to be packing away the items that are better refrigerated. He's opened the last window, the one over the kitchen sink.
"Get your exploring in?" he asks.
It makes her feel a little guilty, until he smiles, and she realizes that's exactly why he sent her to open the windows. He expected her to look around.
"Yeah. Did Carl stay here a lot?"
Shane shrugs and winces when the movement pulls at the infected chest wound. "First couple of years after I got the place, maybe once a month for a weekend. Last year or so, not so much. He was more into video games than being out on the lake."
Sophia thinks if she had an uncle wanting to spend time with her once a month, she would have definitely chosen that over video games. But Carl didn't have a daddy he wanted to avoid, so she guesses that's a big difference between them.
She pushes away that thought and goes to slide the curtain back that covers the pantry. It's maybe only half full, so there's room for their supplies. Like Shane's room and the bedroom used for storage, the pantry shows signs of being packed in a hurry. Things around the outside and on the higher shelves are still neatly sat in rows, but the area that has a few random canned goods, what's left is scattered and even tipped over.
"There's a big freezer downstairs," Shane says. He's looking in the freezer side of the fridge, which she can see from here is full of a mix of mostly microwaveable meals and bags of vegetables. "Should still be a good supply of venison and fish in there, for sure, if the power didn't fail."
"I can go check?" She's curious now, after seeing the freezer at that first farm.
"Grab those keys. It's in that locked storeroom under the stairs on this side."
She pauses at the door long enough to grab the keys he indicated from a hook by the door. Once she's downstairs, she can see there are two storerooms under each set of stairs up. She tries the key and gets the door open. Like at the farm where she heard the fridge humming, she can hear the chest freezer on one side of the room under the stairs working away.
The side of the storeroom opposite the freezer holds a bunch of fishing gear, most of which she can't really identify because Ed wasn't much into fishing.
There's a thermometer on the wall with a cable leading into the freezer, displaying a -10 on the display. She opens it and peers inside. There's a lot of white-wrapped packages with labels like deer stew meat and deer backstrap and dates on one side of the freezer. On the other side are freezer bags of fish. Figuring he'll know better than she does if any of it's still good, she grabs a package of stew meat and a bag of fish to take back upstairs.
Locking the door behind her, she eyes the other storeroom and the keys on the lanyard. Since he didn't seem upset for her exploring the house, she goes around the car and unlocks that door too. This one's full of yard care equipment, so curiosity satisfied, she relocks it and heads back upstairs.
"It was still frozen, now at least," she tells him, placing the two packages on the counter.
"Was the thermometer still working or the alarm beeping?"
"Thermometer said negative ten and the alarm was quiet."
"That's the good news, then. Thing's supposed to beep until it's reset manually, and if it's not beeping and still working, it didn't beep til it killed the battery." He looks at the two packages. "If you want to leave the stew meat to thaw, we can put it in the crockpot. You like venison?"
She shrugs. "Better than squirrel. My dad hunted, but just deer. So I've eaten it before, most years." Her mama always made good meals from the venison Ed brought home. She hopes Shane knows how to cook it as well as he does the beef from the farm.
"Stove's propane, so we're good there, but it'll get damned hot in here if we use the oven for anything. Hot water's propane too. I had the propane tank filled back in April, so we're good a long while just using the stove and water heater. Come winter, we'll have to figure something out for heat. It won't last for that."
The idea that they might still be here come winter appeals, because the house feels like one of the nicest places she's ever been to, but it's also scary. She's caught on that he's not entirely sure Carl's dad will bring everyone back here. It means her mama's out there somewhere they may not ever find her again.
"Got a while before winter, right?" she ventures. Considering her T-shirt is stuck to her back with sweat from the August heat and humidity, winter seems like forever away.
It gets her one of those tired smiles and a nod. She puts the stew meat in the fridge in an empty space and the fish in the freezer. She was right that it was mostly microwave stuff and bags of vegetables, but not all of the vegetables are store bought. That reminds her about the lady with the garden he mentioned.
"Do you think your friend's garden is still good?"
"Maybe. We passed her house back at the curve, the one with the big flower bed around the mailbox."
When Shane's feeling better, she'll ask him to take her down there. Until then, there's more than they can both eat for weeks.
"Is the house on well water?" She remembers him saying wells needed electricity, and obviously they have that here, but city water's different.
"Yeah. Filtered too, so you shouldn't have to worry about boiling it. I'll show you all that another day. I'm going to go shower and see if I can sleep off the fever. You gonna be okay if I do? Nothing should be inside the fence, and we're up too high for walkers to reach if the fence is down somewhere to allow one in."
If she says no, she suspects he'll struggle to go check over the property, and he looks like he's about to fall over. "I'll be okay. Got stuff to put up and plenty to read."
They took all the nursing textbooks, and he just grinned when she packed up an old Amazon shipping box with a bunch of that poor boy's paperback books. Plus, she might not know how to cook very well, but she knows how to work a washing machine and dryer from her consumer science class.
Shane looks at the clock on the wall and rubs at the back of his head with one hand. "Alright. Wake me up about eight if I'm not up so I can take the antibiotics again."
"I will. Do you need me to help with the bandages?" After this morning, watching him try not to yell when she cleaned all the gross infection away, she hopes they're still okay. She isn't sure she's ready to do that to him again, especially after he threw up after.
"I'll peek and see if it needs changing. Will call you if it does."
His pace down the hall is slow and just a little bit wobbly, kind of like Ed when he's had a few beers but isn't actually drunk. Sophia has to force herself to let go of the counter she's holding onto with a death grip, fighting the panic and fear that's almost worse than running from the walkers in the woods. She wipes away tears that threaten, because she isn't going to be a crybaby.
Shane can't get really sick. He just can't.
A/N: Original plan was a time jump of sorts, a Sophia chapter covering several days worth of Shane's recovery. She had other ideas, so you get a reprieve chapter. She's probably "driving" the POV the next chapter or two, at least. The mental shifts between "Ed" and "Daddy" are on purpose.
There's a link to some info for the story on this same chapter on the Ao3 version of this story. I'm DarkTidings there too.