AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I gazed eastward behind me, opposite the river, and spotted a few small buildings just over a hill. With my support, Atticus made the three-minute walk in ten.
“We’ll stay here until the rain passes,” I said.
Atticus nodded weakly.
I peered into the glass windows of an abandoned beauty salon to see it was empty. And when we ventured inside, the smell of water damage and the must of abandonment was heavy in the room; the floor was covered in sand and muck pushed against the walls, beds of leaves filled with trash had settled in the corners, and there was a dark film on the tall windows and dingy walls that stopped just beneath the doorknob, all signs that the river had overflowed its banks and flooded this place at least once, but probably numerous times.
I helped Atticus through the room and led him to an oversized leather chair where women used to relax as they received pedicures and read magazines and gossiped. He sat into the chair heavily, grimacing with his eyes shut tight as he adjusted his body against the pain.
“What hurts the most?” I asked.
Atticus tried to lift his arm, indicating the dislocated elbow, but the pain was too great.
“You’v’hav to seth’it,” he tried to explain, and then pointed with the opposite hand.
“I…think I can do it,” I said, saving him from having to speak. “But I’m afraid. Reading about how to do these things is not the same as doing them. I’ve never had to reset an elbow before—I’ve never had to reset anything before.”
“You can’thoo’it.” (I trusted her, but I didn’t look forward to the process—whether she could do it or not, it would hurt like hell.)
I braced myself—so did Atticus—and positioned both hands around his arm; a second later and the elbow was set back into place. Atticus threw his head against the faux leather chair and screwed his eyes shut. (Ahh! I tried to focus only on breathing as a burning sensation worked its way mercilessly through my arm and shoulder—I nearly passed out.)
I made him a sling from a beautician’s smock I’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the restroom door. “You need to keep it still,” I told him, hoping my medical knowledge was accurate, or at the very least, not going to make him worse.
I took his hand into both of mine and examined the broken fingers. “No, just relax,” I told him when he tried to lift his head from the headrest. “I’m going to make a splint.” I looked around the place. “And I’ll need to find something to clean and stitch the stab wounds with.” I didn’t want to say it out loud, but I had no confidence in ever finding the latter. Improvisation would be my only option in treating him. But Atticus wasn’t a fishing hook fashioned from a soda can tab, or a—I spotted something while worrying.
“These will work for splints, at least,” I said, walking over to a table beside a tall mirror. I plucked four small wooden spatulas from a glass vase probably used to mix hair dye. In a cabinet above the sink, I found an unused roll of black electrical tape shoved behind an empty box.
I took the items and made splints for Atticus’ broken fingers. I saved the stab wounds for last because I saw nothing in the beauty salon that would help treat them. I needed antiseptic, and clean water, and, most important, antibiotics. I searched in every corner, every drawer; I went into the utility closet and turned it upside-down, hoping to find something, anything, but this place had been picked clean long ago, and all I came across were more smocks and a few brightly-colored hair clamps and some old bottles of dried-up nail polish. Oh! A bottle of rubbing alcohol! I felt my face light up when I saw it behind a small waste basket. But my hope came crashing down when I felt the emptiness of the plastic bottle in my hand. I chucked it into the waste basket right along with my short-lived excitement.
“Atticus,” I began, as I emerged from the utility closet, but he was asleep again.
I wanted to move him so he could lay down flat, rather than sitting slouched in the chair, but there was nowhere flat to move him to, except for the floor, and I was trying to prevent his open wounds from getting infected, not the other way around.
Leaving Atticus to get rest, I slipped out the front door of the beauty salon, set on searching the other buildings nearby.
I went into what was once an insurance office, searched it from corner to corner, but found nothing of immediate use, just stacks of printer paper and shelves and filing cabinets chock full of files, and old computers and printers that no longer worked. The building next to the insurance company used to be a second-hand clothing store, but the only clothes left inside were for infants. I thought about the world when The Fever struck, and my heart became heavy: children and the elderly were the most susceptible and died in greater numbers.
I went across the street to an old ice cream shop, but had no luck there, either; the laundromat and the pizza parlor and the Oriental rug store and the bakery—nothing, not even a stack of napkins I could’ve used to keep his wounds clean once I managed to find something to treat them with. If I ever did. But I knew I wouldn’t.
Still, I pressed on, moving through every small building on the street, tossing junk, pocketing potentials—a pair of scissors, a plastic grocery store bag, a child’s sand bucket—and hoping my refusal to give up would reward me with…I stopped cold, surrounded by broken ten-gallon fish tanks and torn bags of colorful rocks scattered about the floor; my eyes grew wide with shock. “I’m seeing things,” I said to myself, unable to tear my eyes away. Yet unable to move any closer, either. “No—if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
I was afraid to bend over and pick up the white plastic bottle, because once I did, and it proved empty, the hope and excitement of the moment would all come crashing down into a pile of lies.
I paused, looking away from the lonely bottle on the floor beckoning me, to take in my surroundings, to hope for a few seconds longer. Shelves were still miraculously stocked with items covered in dust and cobwebs: miniature castles and brightly-colored trees and tiny rock tunnels and artificial coral and intricately-carved pirate ships. Stacked high against the back wall were pet crates of all sizes, cat scratching posts made of wood and carpet. To my right, across from the aquarium section, dozens of collars and leashes still hung from a rack, color-coded, as if they’d never been touched since before society fell—who needed such things anymore when pets were now a food source in the New World?
There wasn’t even a hint of pet food left in the store, not even a dog bone. The pet shampoo and even the flea collars and hair brushes and puppy pads had long since been taken. Humans could make use of anything when trying to survive; they would bathe with flea and tick shampoo, eat dog food, even take medication meant for pets if there was any sensible reason it might help. And in such desperate times, the word ‘sensible’ took on a much looser meaning.
My eyes found the white bottle lying on the floor again, surrounded by red and blue and purple rocks. A part of me was surprised to see it was still there, that it didn’t somehow grow legs and walk right out of the store while my back was turned—it was as ridiculous a theory as the fact that it was there at all. How could they have missed this? How!
I inhaled a deep breath, and then crouched over the bottle. I reached out and took it into my hand, holding all of that excitement and hope deep in my lungs.
“I can’t believe it.” My heart hammered against my ribcage.
I shook the bottle, hearing the little pills inside jumping around against the sides, and my heart pounded faster. When I saw the protective plastic around the lid had not been broken, I gasped. And when I could finally accept that it wasn’t too good to be true, after all, I closed my hand tightly around the bottle and furiously rummaged the area for more. One—two more bottles! Not a single stroke of luck, or gift from God, but three! I scooped them all up, dropped them in the toy bucket and ran as fast as I could back to the beauty salon, the other few items I’d found, clutched in the other hand.
65
ATTICUS
