Clutch ignored Don’s pleas and curses, instead focusing on Maggie. “Tell me about what happened at the Dells.”
She frowned at the change in subject, watched Don and Brenda for another moment, and finally nodded and inhaled deeply. “I don’t understand where they’re coming from, but there’s so many of them, and they seem to be coming from everywhere. We were so well hidden, we were so far from any town, but they still found us. We lost so many.” Her gaze fell and she shook her head slowly from side to side. “Too many.”
Griz came walking over, holding his rifle.
Maggie lifted her head, looked at Griz funny, and then broke out into a wide smile. “My, I haven’t seen a black man in months, and such a fine-looking young man you are.”
Griz raised a brow in amusement.
Clutch spoke first. “How far behind you are the herds, Maggie?”
“Oh,” she stammered and fidgeted. “They’re not far. Not far at all.”
“Exactly how far is that?”
Maggie didn’t answer.
Griz motioned to Clutch. They walked around to my side of the Humvee.
“We don’t have time for this,” Griz said. “Did you find any diesel?”
Clutch shook his head. “Nothing we could get to. You?”
Griz scowled. “It’s going to get hard fast without any power on the boat.”
“You heard the lady,” Clutch said. “We can’t keep looking. The herds are nearly here.”
“I know,” Griz said. “We need to be below decks and silent by the time they show up. It’s getting risky staying out here.”
Clutch frowned. “What do we do about these folks? We have the room, but we don’t have the food. Not since the livestock was destroyed. We can’t leave them here. They’d get slaughtered.”
Griz pointed to the west. “There’s a farm a few miles straight west of here. We found a black SUV in the driveway that runs. You can’t miss it. I can take one of them to go get it. That’ll help them get some distance between them and the herds.”
“Until they run out of gas,” Clutch said. “If we don’t take them in, they’re zed bait.”
Griz gave him a knowing look. “They could distract the herds from us.”
My heart pounded. Even though my brain was telling me the same thing, my gut was screaming at me at how wrong this felt.
Clutch gave me a look and his features softened. “We take them with us. It’s only six—well, five—extra mouths to feed.”
Griz looked relieved but then frowned as he looked at the injured woman. “She bit?”
Clutch gave a slow shake of his head. “Gangrene.”
Griz grimaced. “We came across a vet clinic this morning. We have the supplies on board to give her peace. It’s the only thing we can offer her.”
“I’m not sure her husband and daughter would agree to that,” I chimed in. Without modern medicine, people often died horrible, painful deaths from infections. Euthanasia was one of the few things we could offer the doomed, and vet clinics offered plenty of the drug guaranteed to bring painless death.
“Then we give them the choice. They can either stay here with her or come with us,” Griz said. “Gangrene isn’t contagious, but we can’t risk bringing any new sources of infection onto the Aurora in case she’s got more than a case of gangrene. Not with how many are just recovering now.”
Clutch stiffened and snapped around as Don hurried toward the Humvee.
“Stand back,” he ordered Don.
Don kept walking toward us. “I heard what you said. You can’t leave Brenda behind. You don’t know her. She’s strong. She’ll recover.”
“She has gangrene,” Clutch said simply, as though that answered everything.
“She may also have contracted a secondary infection that could potentially spread. We can’t risk it,” Griz added. “Now, please step back.”