One Second After

She smiled back and he could not help but notice how her T-shirt, sweat soaked, clung to her body. His gaze lingered on her for several seconds until she made eye contact with him again.

“My, you are getting healthy again,” she said softly, still smiling, and he lowered his eyes.

The potatoes were good, though still a bit undercooked. He scraped down to the bottom of the bowl, picked it up to sip the last of the greasy fluid, and set it back down.

“More?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Just take it slow. You had a rough siege of it there. Staph infections like that, well, you are one tough guy to be up on your feet.” She stood and refilled his bowl. “The girls, how are they?”

“Jen, she’s a remarkable woman. Tough as nails. Of course she misses Tyler terribly, I could hear her crying at night, but at the same time is able to accept it and then focus on those she loves that she feels responsible for. Actually, I think she was a bit upset that I moved in here for several days to see after you. Said she could handle it herself.”

“You moved in?”

“Only temporary, John,” she replied with a smile as she put the bowl down in front of him and sat to resume her meal. “Doctor’s orders actually. Kellor and Charlie were damn worried about you. Said they wanted you alive and back on your feet, so I sort of got volunteered.”

“Reluctantly?” John asked. She smiled. “Not exactly.”

“I really don’t remember that much.”

“Well, you damn near had your brain fried. Temp up at one-oh-five, hand swollen like a balloon. Three weeks back and you’d of been in isolation in an ICU, ice packed, IVs. It got a bit rough there. Kellor thought he’d have to go to amputation to save you if the antibiotics didn’t get the infection under control.”

“Just from a cut in a stupid fight.”

“I warned you,” she said, half-waving her spoon at him. “Staph in a hospital is a twenty-four-seven fight. That nursing home, three days without cleaning, sanitation, you had a hundred different microbes floating around there and you just so happened to pick one of the worst.”

“How?”

“How? You had an open wound damn near to the bone. Touching a counter, a patient, remember, John, the old days are gone; hospitals are more dangerous now than just staying at home.”

“How is it up there?”

“Twelve left of the original patients.”

“What? There used to be over sixty.”

“Thirty-one dead. Six just disappeared.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Alzheimer’s that were still mobile. Remember, no security alarms. They just wandered outside, into the woods. Poor souls, most likely died within a day or two from exposure. We decided yesterday to abandon the place, move those who are left up to a dorm in the conference center. Without all the electronics you can’t keep an eye on the Alzheimer’s. I never thought I’d see such a thing again, but we have them restrained, tied to their beds.”

She sighed.

“Sounds horrible, John, but it will be best when they’re gone. We need at least four people staffing them around the clock. At least at the dorm there’s only two doors in and out, and frankly, it’s cleaner.”

“What else?”

She sighed.

“It’s been bad.”

“How so?”

“A fight at the gap two nights ago.”

“How bad?”

“More than two hundred dead on both sides, several hundred injured.”

“Jesus, what happened?”

“Well, we were letting folks through a hundred a time, again your suggestion, good professor. It was going slow, though, and now the refugees from Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, even some from as far as Durham were piling up on that road. God, John, it’s positively medieval down on that road. Squatters’ camps, people fighting for a scrap of food. Disease breaking out, mostly salmonella, pneumonia, a nasty variant of the flu.

“Well, a group was being escorted through and they broke. Started running to get off the interstate and into the woods. Two of them had concealed pistols, shot the two policemen escorting them. Shot them dead on the spot. And then they just started scattering.

“Tom ordered them rounded up, Doc Kellor was having a fit as well that they might be carrying something. It turned ugly. Most were too weak to get far, but some of them did put up a fight. About twenty are unaccounted for, disappeared up into the hills. Most are harmless, but a few, the ringleaders, they’re out there and Tom is hunting them down.

“That triggered the riot back at the barrier. Charlie ordered it shut down until the mess was straightened out and they just rioted. I mean thousands of them just pushing against the barrier of cars and trucks. Tom did have some tear gas to push them back, but then they came back in….”

“So we opened fire?”

She nodded.

“You could hear it all over town. Sounded like a regular war. Tom had a couple of men with automatic weapons posted up on the side of the pass firing down. John, I never dreamed we’d be doing this to each other.”

She fell silent, poking at a piece of hot dog at the bottom of her bowl.