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
I pried my uninjured eye open with a painful grunt; my lip split again, and I could taste a trickle of blood running into one corner of my mouth. The room seemed darker than moments ago when I’d fallen asleep, just minutes after Thais reset my elbow and splinted my fingers. The patter of raindrops on the pavement outside was soothing, and I could smell something burning that was neither foul nor particularly pleasant.
I lifted my head, tried to reposition my back against the chair. When I opened the eye further, I saw that it was darker in the room because it hadn’t been just moments ago I’d fallen asleep—it must’ve been hours.
“Thais?” My voice was weak, shaky.
“I’m right here,” I heard her say, but I couldn’t see her; I noticed a shadow moving against the wall, and I could hear liquid sizzling against coals, and her footsteps moving across the floor.
“Ho’vlong…I been ‘sleep?”
She stepped into my line of sight with a coffee mug in her hands; steam rose from the rim.
“Since yesterday,” she told me, and held the mug out so I could grasp it. “You needed the rest. Here, drink this. Good vitamin C.” She held the mug until I had a good grip on it with my uninjured hand.
As I brought the mug to my lips, the smell of pine needles wafted into my nose.
“Use the straw,” she told me, and then I felt her fingers touch mine as she guided it toward my mouth. “And sip slowly; it’s still a little hot.” I hadn’t even seen the straw before, my vision limited to only one eye.
I took a sip and then held the mug out for her to take it.
“No, you need to drink all of it,” she mothered. “And you need to take this pill. Should’ve started a round yesterday, but I couldn’t wake you enough to make sure you got it down.”
She held out her hand and a little white oval-shaped pill sat in her palm.
“What is it?” I was leery; taking random pills was as risky as eating wild mushrooms, and I thought we’d already been over that.
“It’s penicillin,” she said.
I looked at her awkwardly with my one opened eye.
“How…do you know?” I asked. “Better yet, how’s vat even vs’ossible?”
Thais put the pill into my hand and enclosed my fingers around it. Then she slipped out of my line of sight for a moment, and came back with a white bottle. She held it up so I could see. On the label there was a tropical fish, and above it read: ‘Fish Pen Forte’, and in smaller letters beneath it: ‘(Penicillin)’.
I looked at her with part disbelief, part shock.
“Where’d you v’ind dis?”
“Pet store across the street,” she answered. “I’m surprised no one noticed them before.”
“Vem? How many?”
“I found three bottles. Unopened. Seals unbroken. Atticus, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
I looked down at the pill in my hand again, still not believing it, and then tried to give it back to her.
“Need to save it,” I insisted. “I’m going to’ve vine, but in case you ever get sick—”