“I need to go to the bathroom too,” said Eric. Meg had placed on a TV table in front of him a small pile of clear, plastic tubing, several plastic connectors, a syringe and a couple of l.V. bags. Meg recinched the woman’s rope to the ring bolt. She had untied it from the bolt and walked the woman into the bathroom while Jared gave her slack. He jerked the rope when the woman was almost in the bathroom, and she squawked. “Makin’ sure you know I’m here, dearie,” he said, but he didn’t do it again after Meg gave him a venomous look.
“You take him,” she said, and moved over to loosen Eric. She talked quietly, without opening her lips much. The chapping at the corners of her mouth looked worse. Big cracks deep with pus. “Undo his hands,” said Jared.
“Wimp,” said Meg.
“I’m not holding another man steady so he can take a piss.” The mechanics of how he was to go to the bathroom hadn’t occurred to Eric. He envisioned overpowering Jared, maybe beating him with his own bat and becoming the hero. Old, slow and drunk, thought Eric. I can take him. But the thought of trying the same with Meg made him reconsider. She’d moved like a prize fighter when she’d beat Jared earlier. Her upper arms were meaty. She probably couldn’t run a hundred yard dash, but underneath the weight lurked a perilous and strong woman. He’d better not.
As if reading his mind, Meg said, “I can haul you off the floor in a second, fellow. You’re not too big for that.”
When Eric stood, he realized what Meg meant. He was clearly taller than Jared, and had an inch or two on her. Jared referring to him as a man earlier, and Meg’s careful hold on the rope made him think about how they might see him. I’m not a kid to them, he thought, but I feel like a kid. Maybe if I keep my mouth shut, they won’t figure it out.
Any hope of finding a razor blade, or a shard of glass in the bathroom to use on his rope later vanished when he walked in. Jared pushed the door shut on the rope, and the thread of dim light through the door’s crack revealed nothing. Eric felt for the toilet. Then, as he went to the bathroom, he wondered if the dark-haired woman thought of him as a child or an adult. Maybe we’re just equal, he thought. Eric caught the dark-haired woman’s eye as he walked back to his stool, and smiled a little to let her know his spirits were up, that he wasn’t going to surrender. She lifted her chin slightly in acknowledgment.
As Meg tied his hands again, she said, “I’m going to take a bit of blood from you.” She yanked on the rope. Eric flinched. He’d been tightening his wrists, figuring that when he relaxed, the knots would be loose, but Meg must have noticed. It felt as if his bones were being pushed together. She continued,
“This’ll go better if you don’t fight me. If you move around, I might have to stick you a few times. I’m a bit rusty at this.” She slapped her thigh, as if she’d told a joke, but she didn’t smile, and her movements were sure and swift.
“Quit your jabbering and get on with it,” said Jared. He stood by the T.V. table, looking worse than he had earlier in the day. Could be the light, thought Eric, but he couldn’t tell. Black circles underlined Jared’s eyes, and his breathing seemed faster and more watery.
Meg fastened a needle to one end of the plastic tubing, and the other to a three-way stopcock. The syringe went into the middle plug on the stopcock, and the I.V. bag fastened to the third. Jared said, “Is this gonna work?”
Meg turned Eric toward the water heater—he couldn’t see Jared or the dark-haired woman now—and swabbed his inner arm with a wet cotton ball. “Don’t know,” she said. “Better than the alternative.” Eric bit his upper lip, afraid he would yelp when she poked the needle in. Then he said, “Don’t you need to know what my blood type is?” He knew from biology classes that blood types had to match for transfusions.
She gripped his upper arm hard and pushed the needle through the skin. He barely flinched. “I’m AB positive. Anything will work for me. Universal recipient,” she said. “Don’t know about Jared.” She drew back on the syringe. The plastic tubing turned red. “Got to do this is a hurry. Little bit of heparin in the bag’ll keep it from coagulating, but not long.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know about me?” Jared asked angrily.
“Don’t. Ain’t that clear? If the types don’t match, might make you sick. Might kill you. I’ve got no way to type blood, and I don’t know how. I figure the way your cough’s going, and the way that fever keeps spiking, that you ain’t good for three or four more days tops as it is.” She turned the stopcock and pushed blood into the I.V. bag. Eric couldn’t connect the blood to him. The process was more interesting than frightening.
Eric said, “How much are you going to take?”
“Filled with questions, ain’t we?” Meg turned the stopcock again and pulled out another syringe full.
“Hospitals only take a pint, but I figure they’re extra cautious.” Blood squirted into the bag. “Couple pints. Might take more.” She filled the syringe again. “Worried about it?” He didn’t answer. Where the needle was taped to his arm began to burn a little, and he felt dizzy, so he shut his eyes. He heard the blood squirt into the bag several more times, then she jerked the tape off and put a band-aid over the tiny wound.
When she finished with the dark-haired woman, she piled the two blood-filled bags and the rest of the equipment onto the TV table, picked it up, and started out of the room.
Swaying on her seat, the dark-haired woman said, “You can’t leave us like this all night. We’ve got to sleep.”
Meg stopped. The room was nearly dark now, so her face was lost in the shadows. “You stay there till morning, child, and if the blood works, we’ll see about chaining you to a wall or something, but until then, a night without sleep won’t kill you.”
And Jared said, “If the blood works, we might see about getting you some more lively company too.” He spun the dead man on his rope. Then—Eric couldn’t be sure in the half-light—he winked at the woman and licked his lips.
Long after the last light faded, Eric asked, “You all right?” His stomach ached and he still felt dizzy. In the darkness, the silence scared him. He peered hard in the dark-haired woman’s direction, eyes wide, trying for any sense of where she was.
“Yeah,” she answered, finally.
“Do you think they’re still in the house?” He hadn’t heard a noise from upstairs for sometime.
“Probably.” Her throaty voice floated in the air. “The blood idea, it won’t work.”
“How do you know?”
He heard her move on her stool, maybe to face him. “Scientists aren’t stupid. If the plague could be treated this easily, no one would have it. They’d figure out what it was in the blood that keeps some people well, then they’d duplicate it. Nope, they’re doomed.”
He thought about that for a while. He could hear her breathing, the room was so quiet. “What did you mean earlier,” he said, “about a horse learning to talk?”
The dark-haired woman chuckled, It was a tired sounding chuckle, but Eric liked it. “Oh, it’s an old story. Goes like this, In an ancient kingdom there lived a cruel king who executed any one who upset him. Well, one day a man is hauled into the king’s court for some minor crime, and the king’s just about ready I pronounce sentence, which will be death, when the man says to the king, ‘If you give me a year, your Majesty, I can teach your horse to talk.’ Well, this intrigues the king, so he tells the man to do it, but if the horse isn’t talking at the end of the year, the man will be executed. As the man is being hauled down to the stables, the guard says to him, ‘What a stupid thing to do. You’ll never make that horse talk. Why’d you agree to try it?’ The man looks him over, then says, ‘This is the way I figure it. A lot can happen in a year. I might die. The king might die. Or hell, the horse might talk.’”