Dez muttered a few swear words, and then she was there.
"What is it?" she said.
At that moment, Katie fell over on her side. Dez, without thinking, moved to catch her and prevent her from crashing into the ground.
"Lay her down on the bed," Joan said. She struggled to move off of the bed herself, grabbing her spear to leverage herself up and off the sagging bed. Pain shot through her leg, but she didn't have time for the pain. She hobbled to the chair as Dez struggled with Katie's limp body.
Dez managed to lift the top half of Katie's unconscious body onto the bed, and then lifted her legs up. Katie didn't stir or wake at all.
Joan used the butt of the spear to hop around the bed and come to the right side where she could get a better look at Katie's wound. She pressed her hand to the wound. It felt like fire.
"Shit," she said. It was her official diagnosis.
"What's wrong with her?" Dez asked.
"I wish I knew."
Joan stood, chewing her lip and wishing she had anything at her disposal besides her own two hands. A lab, a thermometer, another dozen or so doctors with more experience than her, any of them would do nicely.
"She gonna die?" Dez asked, turning to her with those haunting green eyes. They were circled with bags, and Dez didn't look so hot herself.
"I don't know."
"Well, Jesus fuck, what do you know?"
Joan looked hard at Dez. She saw the girl for what she was, damaged, traumatized, and she bit back a harsh response. "We're just going to have to keep an eye on her."
"She's gonna die in the middle of the night and turn into one of those things."
Joan had considered the possibility, but she didn't think so. Whatever was making Katie ill was taking its time about it. "I don't think so."
"Now, if you said 'know,' then I might feel a little more convinced. But 'think' doesn't cut it for me."
"Fine, then I know so." Dez regarded her with a cold, calculating look.
"No one leaves her side," Dez said. "One of us needs to be with her at all times."
Joan nodded. "We can't tell anyone else. None of the others can know. They'll want to kill her."
"Fuck 'em," Dez said. "They didn't lift a finger to help me. If this goes ass up, I don't care what happens to them."
Joan shared her sentiment to a certain degree, but she didn't actually want any of the others to die. There weren't enough people in the world for that. Every life was important now. But Katie's life was the one she most cared about. She knew her, had survived with her, had even seen glimpses of the person she could be. Beneath her cold, almost sociopathic exterior was someone who loved hard. She didn't show it, but Joan knew the feelings were there. How else could she explain the depths she had gone to in order to save Clara from certain death. She had risked it all for her best friend, and though Katie hadn't pulled off the daring rescue, she had tried as hard as she could.
"It's agreed. No one gets in here."
Dez nodded, and Joan pressed a hand to Katie's forehead. Still warm. With her leg sending wave after wave of nauseating pain to her brain, she asked Dez to bring her the chair so she could sit and wait… and think.
****
Theresa, Tammy, and Liz sat around the campfire, just as they had done when the men were still alive. They missed their men, but they didn't talk about it much anymore. They were gone, buried, their graves hidden underneath the snow, marked only by river rocks that Tammy had arranged into a cross.
Tammy was the religious one, which only made sense. She was the type that would believe anything if you told her it was true.
"What do you think they're doing in there?" Liz asked.
Theresa glanced at Liz from the corner of her eye. She couldn't look her full in the face on most occasions. That thick hairy mole on her face made her stomach turn for some reason. She was a good person. She listened. She did what she was told, and you could count on her. She wasn't bad in the sack either.
"How should I know? They could be having an orgy for all I know."
"Ewww… you think they would?" Liz asked.
Liz didn't sound averse to the idea, even though she pretended to be. Tammy blushed red. Tammy knew that sometime over the last few weeks, Theresa and Liz had gotten closer. Tammy knowing didn't bother Theresa at all. It was a different world now, and one had to find comfort where they found it. One day, Theresa was sure that Tammy would find her way into her bed, and she wouldn't kick her out.
When she had worked at Appleby's, she had worked with several lesbian employees. They were people just like her, trying to make their way through the world, trying to find anything to make it worth living in. If that thing came with a vagina instead of a dick, she wasn't anyone to judge.
She had been one of those people once, trying to find a light in the darkness. She thought she had found it at the camp, among like-minded people who just wanted to make it through this disaster. She had been with Reed and Chad since the beginning–– since they came back to the trailer park with a frazzled Dez Bronson in tow.
Chad had called a meeting, gathering up all of the trailer park residents and offering them his vision of survival. Not everyone had agreed with his plan. Most of the residents of the park walked away. Why
