Cruel World(62)

“Holy shit,” Alice said, stepping closer. Her breath was hot on his chest, and he raised his head, trying not to focus on the sensation. “I’m just going to clean it the best I can and wrap it. I don’t think we should put any ointment on it until we see how bad it is.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. Alice soaked a chunk of gauze with bottled water and began to dab at the wound, her fingers on the undamaged skin of his shoulder cool and strong. He closed his eyes and let her work, trying not to flinch or jerk when she applied pressure to the burn. He focused instead on his breathing, trying to time it with hers. In and out, calm and collected. When she finished cleaning as best she could, she taped a sterile bandage loosely over the area, allowing the burn to breathe.

“You could’ve been a nurse,” he said, glancing at the careful work she’d done.

“And you could’ve been an Abercrombie model.” She paused, her eyes shifting to his before packing up the first aid kit. “I mean, you’re in really great shape. Do you lift weights or something?”

“I used to rock climb a lot.”

“Sure. Well, hopefully that doesn’t get infected. Maybe tomorrow we can find a pharmacy, upgrade our little kit here into something really useful.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She hesitated before zipping the pack shut. “You’re welcome. Thanks for what you did on the bridge. I wouldn’t have thought of that, didn’t think of it.” He pulled his shirt over his head and adjusted the fabric covering the bandage.

“I had no idea if it would work to be honest.”

“But you tried anyway, so thank you.”

He nodded, and they looked at one another for a long moment that broke as Alice tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear and moved toward the doorway leading into the house.

“It’s going to get chilly tonight,” she said, pausing on the threshold.

“I’ll find some firewood,” he said. And then she was gone inside the house, and he was left only with the fresh burning in his shoulder and the twilight that crept closer over the fields.

~

He found an ancient wood box outside the back door that was partially full of decaying oak. The light was beginning to fail in the west when he got the fire going, its glow warming the open space of the room. They heated a mixture of MREs in a camp pan near the hearth after Alice tried the lights and the old electric stove in the small kitchen to no avail. Quinn woke Ty with a gentle shake to the shoulder when the food was ready, but the boy only pushed some of the meal around his plate before lying back down and falling asleep again.

“Stress,” Alice said after a stint of silence broken only by the crackling fire.

“What?” Quinn asked, setting down his own half-eaten meal. The concoction of beef and beans didn’t taste bad, but the texture was terrible, the mealiness catching in his throat with each bite.

Alice nodded to her son. “He’s exhausted from what happened today. He didn’t have to see. He knew how close…” Her voice broke on the last word, and she gazed down at her plate.

“He’s safe.”

“For how long? Until the next group of those things we run into?” She shook her head and glanced out the darkening window. “We have to get to Iowa. It’s the only place that we have a hope.”

“We’ll get there, you’ll see.”

She looked at him, and the light played off the angles of her face, her eyes unmoving from his. His skin warmed, and he finally looked away, setting his plate on the floor.

“We didn’t find another car for us,” Alice said.

“No.”

“And you didn’t ask to be brought back to your house.”

“No.”

She opened her mouth to say something more but then a smile played upon her lips and she gestured to the corner of the room. “We have a visitor.”

A mouse watched them from beside the couch. It balanced on its hind legs, sniffing the air, its beaded, black eyes studying them before scurrying to Ty’s uneaten food. It looked at them again and then began to nibble at a piece of corn.

“I wonder if that will be us in a decade,” Quinn murmured, watching the rodent’s tiny paws grip the kernel and turn it.

“What do you mean?”

“If we’ll be searching out scraps of what’s left of the world.”

“You mean if we lose.”