Thicker Than Blood (Thicker Than Blood #1)(38)
Placing a hand on Alex’s forearm, I stepped in front of him, not to shield him from this man, but in an attempt to keep the peace. My heart was telling me one thing, but my head was telling me another. My head wanted me to run, get the hell away from this time bomb of a child, but the other part of me, a small voice buried deep down, told me that she was just a little girl and this poor man, her father, deserved our help.
“How can I help?” Leisel asked again.
Several more tense seconds ticked by while the man continued to stare over my head, his angry gaze on Alex, until finally he gave his head a small shake and turned away. He headed toward the small stove, his worn boots scraping noisily on the wood floor, then bent down and poked at the small fire glowing within.
“A bowl,” he mumbled. “Get me a bowl. I need to sterilize the water.”
Still sitting with the child, Leisel stared up at me, her eyes burning with an unrelenting pleading until I couldn’t take it anymore, the guilt she forced me to feel. I turned abruptly, going off in search of a bowl, bumbling along the shelves filled with odd bottles of liquid, rusty cans, and mangled boxes.
Eventually I found a bowl, a heavy metal pot with a thick handle. Pulling it down from the shelf, I crossed the cabin and handed it to the man. He promptly filled it with water from a canister hanging at his hip, and after setting it on top of the stove to boil, he busied himself with a pestle and mortar that he used to grind some herbs. The entire time he was grinding, his gaze flicked between the child and Alex, as if he expected Alex to make a move when he wasn’t looking.
When the water began to hiss, bubbling over the top of the pot, the man carefully removed it and sprinkled in some of the crushed herbs, then mixed them together. When he seemed satisfied with his concoction, he headed back to the bed, grunting at Leisel to move out of his way.
Looking from the pot in his hand to the gaping wound on the little girl’s neck, Leisel shook her head, but reluctantly stood. Making her way back to me, her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. While I was sad for the little girl, and for her father as well, I was more concerned with our personal well-being. The pustules had started to form all over her body, big white blisters filled with pus and blood. Once that little girl turned, rigor mortis having not yet set in, she would be a quick and efficient weapon of death. And only sometime after, when her muscles had become stiff, would she slow down, until eventually she’d begin to decompose, making her movements still slow, but fluid once again.
“We need to go,” Alex said through gritted teeth.
“She’ll be fine,” the man said, not bothering to turn around. “Once I clean it, she’ll be fine.”
His voice was strained, shaking ever so slightly, and his shoulders were hunched, but his hands worked quickly at applying his homemade herbal paste. From what I could tell from where I stood, it seemed to have stopped the bleeding, but it would do nothing for the infection. If the CDC hadn’t been able to figure out a cure or even a preventative treatment, then I doubted this man’s herbal paste had succeeded where they had failed.
Though that didn’t mean I wasn’t hoping. That I wasn’t standing there waiting for the blisters to retreat, for her breathing to return to normal, for her eyes to open, to look up at her father with a smile on her innocent face.
But that wasn’t what happened. She took a sudden gasping breath, her chest heaving one last time, and then she fell still, her lips forever parted in a silent O.
“She’s dead,” Alex said, bluntly enough that I rewarded him with an elbow to his ribs.
Standing, his shoulders slumping even more so than before, the man turned to look at us. I waited with bated breath, imagining him turning feral, attacking Alex for his cruel words. Instead he faced us, a sad and defeated man, his long hair hanging around his face like a dark curtain of despair, his nostrils tightly flaring as he struggled to contain his crumbling emotions.
“She was my little girl,” he whispered brokenly, his eyes finally meeting mine. “She was all I had left.” His voice cracked over the last few words, and then he began to cry. Not the subtle, unassuming tears of someone we didn’t know, but the exhausted, heartbroken tears of a man with nothing left. His sobs were loud and pitiful, and the more he tried to control himself, the harder he cried.
The three of us stood frozen, unsure of what to do, what to say, and what was there to say? We couldn’t fix this—no one could fix this. This was what the infection did. It attacked, it killed, it destroyed all things, beautiful and not. It held no regard for the young or the old, for the color of their skin or religious beliefs, for social standing or perceived importance.
It just killed and killed and killed.
It killed everything.
Leisel began to cry with him and then, before I could stop her, she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around the man, this stranger. Pulling him against her, she cradled his large shaking frame while whispering soothing noises in his ear, much like she had done with me. One hand rubbed his back in slow, sure circles. The familiarity of her actions was almost choking in its awkwardness. We didn’t know him, not who he had been, nor who he was now. Yet she was treating him as if she’d known him her entire life. This was who she was—the caretaker, the peacemaker, the woman people went to when they needed comfort.
An odd thought struck me then, a painful realization. Leisel wasn’t weak, not in the true sense of the word. She might be fragile physically, she might be easily upset, always wearing her emotions on her sleeve, but out of the three of us—Alex, Leisel, and myself—she was the one who’d held on to her humanity the most, not an easy task in a world gone to hell. And all this time, I’d assumed I was stronger than her because I would easily—and gladly—walk away from situations like this, because I was prepared to kill and maim and to damn others to misery if it meant keeping the two of us safe.