“You can come closer,” Tasha says, softly. “It would be nice for him to have someone he knows nearby.”
She sits by Brian’s head and takes his hand like she did in the truck. It’s clammy, his forehead warm and damp.
“He has a fever,” she whispers. “That’s not a good sign, is it?”
The other women, intent on the leg, don’t answer. Tasha is using a sponge to clean the wound and a pair of tweezers to remove tiny fragments of bone.
The leg is broken in several places.
“Anterior and posterior tibial arteries intact,” Tasha says. She nods to Moira. “You did well to staunch the bleeding.”
Moira squeezes Brian’s hand and fixes her gaze on the collection of bone fragments that Tasha is amassing.
“Here,” Annie says, after some time. “Hold this.”
Moira takes the flashlight that Annie offers, then trains it back on Brian’s leg. Tasha positions and grasps the broken bottom part of the shin bone, then slowly pulls as Annie braces the leg. Sweat stands out in beads on Tasha’s forehead and for several long, impossible moments no one makes a sound. The bone slides into place.
“There,” Tasha says, a note of quiet triumph in her voice. “Next one.”
Moira holds the flashlight steady. The light doesn’t waver. The light doesn’t go out.
When they are done, Moira leaves Brian bandaged and sleeping on the mattress at the back, his leg splinted and immobile as Annie and Tasha clean up.
JJ and Darby and the blonde girl, Elyse, sit in the clinic waiting room, half-asleep.
“He’s all right,” Moira says, and she watches Darby and JJ relax. “At least for now. Tasha says we have to watch for signs of infection but they still have some antibiotics, so hopefully he’ll be okay.” She plops down into an empty seat beside Elyse, then leans forward and puts her head in her hands.
“Here,” Elyse says, softly, and when Moira looks up, the girl is offering her an apple and a potato in her outstretched hands. “When did you last eat?”
Moira can’t remember. She takes the apple and bites into it as she rolls the potato around in her hand.
Tasha comes out of the back room and sits in a chair on the other side of Moira. “Joseph,” she says, “what did you do after you left?”
“I biked as far away as I could get,” he says. “Left the others almost right away—scrounged food where I could, slept in ditches. I made it almost as far as the water before—before anything else happened.”
“And when the—scream—came?”
Joseph looks at his hands. “I was in bed,” he says. “Some of the places I passed through were doing better than others. Ramshackle hotels, places where people were surviving without power. When I heard people screaming outside—” he clears his throat—“I saw my wife burning, and my boys, after the meteors came. Over and over in my head. I stood up, and reached out for the window, ready to break the glass”—he reaches a hand out now—“and there was a tree there, so close I could almost touch it. I counted a leaf, and then another, and another. I just kept counting. And the memories went away, eventually.” He clears his throat again. “When the meteors came, that’s what saved me then too, in a way. We’d gone on a road trip, and I was outside packing the van when the meteor took the hotel and the van with it. It missed me by inches. It was so hot I couldn’t stay there, so I just started walking away, counting my footsteps as I went. I got to ten thousand before I came to.”
“I counted too,” Moira says. “When the scream came. I was in a bathroom, and I counted the tiles.”
“And you?” Tasha asks Darby.
“I was buried when the meteors came,” he says. A shudder goes through them all. “It took three days for people to dig me out. I spent most of the time thinking about going on vacation somewhere tropical and imagining the drinks I would buy, the things I would see when I went scuba diving. I’ve never been scuba diving.” He shrugs, then laughs a little. “Happy place, right? That’s what my therapist told me, years ago.”
Tasha tells them about the greenhouse—the long walks she took to its warmth in the winter, the madness and grief she experienced there that left her shaking on the ground.
“It got bearable,” she says, “eventually. As though the flowers… prepared me, somehow.” She looks at them all. “The same way that your lives—the things your lives forced you to know—prepared you.”
“So—what?” Darby laughs again, tiredly. “Only the broken survive? Is that it?”
“Nobody here is broken.” Elyse’s voice is fierce.
Moira only shrugs. “It’s not that complicated. Grief is boring. You get used to anything in time—even that.”
“But some people don’t,” Tasha says, glancing at Annie, who has come to stand in the doorway. “Lots of people didn’t—look at how few of us are left. Annie and Elyse and I are the only ones left in the whole city.”
At this, JJ—Joseph, Moira tells herself—stirs. “Everyone?” he says.
Tasha spreads her hands. “As far as we can tell. We’ve gone walking a lot. We haven’t found anyone else.”
“Anyway,” Annie says, abruptly, “we’re leaving. We should have left months ago.”
“But what about the centaur?” Moira says. Everyone freezes, and she watches them all register this fact again—they’ve been so wrapped up in Brian they forgot. Her too. “You’ve seen him?”
“I saw him,” Elyse says. “With Heather, by the greenhouse near the mountain. Just before the scream came.”
“Heather?” Joseph gets up from his chair. “She was there? With the creature—the centaur—whatever it is?”
“Who’s Heather?” Moira snaps.
But Joseph is looking at Tasha. “I told you that mountain was strange,” he says. “It brought me back again. Twice.”
“Who’s Heather?” Moira says. “What the fuck is going on?”
Tasha hasn’t taken her eyes from Joseph. “She died weeks ago, with the others.”
“Tasha, I think she’s alive.”
None of them can take in any more. Exhausted, they curl up in the chairs and try to sleep. Tasha and Annie sleep in the back room, near Brian, who is fitful. In the early morning Tasha checks him and finds that his fever has gone down a little.
“He’ll need something to eat,” she says, looking to Annie. “Let’s get him something warm.” The other woman nods.
They go outside and make their way to the townhouse, where they grab some rice and beans. They come back and light a fire in the alley pit behind the clinic, then take turns stirring the rice and beans over the fire. Annie is the one who brings it up again.
“Heather knew,” she says. “She knew this whole time.”
Tasha stares into the pot. “Looks that way.”
“Did you—suspect her?”
Tasha stirs for a while before she answers. “I don’t know what I suspected,” she says at last. “There was something about her that drew me in. Like—oh, Annie, I don’t know. Like she was family? Somehow? Or maybe I just thought she knew more about the mountain than she was letting on. But everyone else—there were so many stories. Foxes and murdered babies and people who disappeared. I didn’t know what to believe.”
Annie lets out a grim laugh. “I thought you were in love with her,” she says. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”