“I…can’t…go any farther, Atticus.”
I lay in the backseat of an old sedan, barely able to raise my head from the leather, much less force the rest of my body into motion. My muscles ached and had grown so weak they felt like mush underneath my skin; the bones in my feet hurt so much I thought they might crumble if I took another step; I saw black floaties in my vision, like tiny bacteria moving around under a microscope; my lips were dry and cracked and my skin felt like crepe paper and my stomach was so empty it churned and made awful noises as though trying to eat itself. But most of all, I was just tired, so utterly exhausted that even the thought of walking another mile made me feel like death would almost be a more viable option.
ATTICUS
I sat beside Thais, with her legs stretched across the seat and my lap; I stroked her arm with my hand, and I gazed out the car’s windshield glazed over by a filmy layer of dirt. The air was humid, and the sun still blazed in the sky—it had been for days—which made travel that much more unbearable. Or, maybe, that heat boiling inside my head, causing the rest of my skin to prickle, wasn’t the weather, but a fever raging inside of me.
I couldn’t bear to tell Thais because it would worry her, but the stab wound on my thigh didn’t feel so good. When Thais wasn’t looking, I would take double the dosage of penicillin.
Another day passed, but we didn’t walk far: less than three miles before we needed to rest again. And still, there was no food to be found, but we managed to find water, leftover from the last rain in a ditch just off a dirt road. Stagnant. Filthy. Bugs floated drunkenly above it and skittered along the surface. And we had no way to sterilize it. But it was all the water we had, and it was drink and risk getting sick, or don’t drink and risk death without it.
And so we drank straight from the hole, gulping the water from our cupped hands as if we’d never known what the heavenly liquid felt like in our mouths.
We fell next to one another after we’d had our fill, the sun blazing down on us, but we couldn’t move to find shade.
“Are we going to die?” Thais asked, though I got the feeling that what she really had wanted to say was: “If we stay here, we’re going to die.”
“No, we’re not going to die.” I answered; my eyes were closed, my breathing unsteady, my body sweating as it tried to burn off the fever. But what I had really wanted to say was: “You won’t, but I just might.”
The sky opened up again in the night and stirred us from our sleep. Grateful for the clean water and slightly cooler air the rain brought with it, we woke with weak smiles on our faces, and we just lay there, looking up at the nighttime sky as the rain fell on us in heavy torrents and gave us some relief.
Thais let the rain fill up the small toy bucket, and we drank until it was empty. And she filled it up again, instructed me to drop my pants, and she cleaned my wounds.
“This one feels too…tight,” Thais said as she pressed her fingers carefully around the wound on my thigh.
I swallowed nervously, and hoped she wouldn’t notice the extent of the infection.
THAIS
I peered in closer, unable to see just how red and inflamed the skin was in the darkness, but enough I could tell it was getting infected.
I looked up at him, his face still very much swollen from his injuries, but he opened both eyes now at least.
“This one doesn’t look good, Atticus.”
He shrugged it off. “It feels all right. No different than the others.”
I didn’t believe him for a moment, but then I gave in, confident the penicillin would do its job.
“Well, we still need to find some kind of antiseptic,” I said, “before it gets worse.”
And that night, when we came upon a small mechanic’s garage with an old rusted truck parked outside, I was blessed once again with just what I needed, this time to pack his wounds and help keep them clean.
“Hold still,” I instructed.
ATTICUS
I sat on the oil-stained concrete floor of the garage with my back against the wall. I wasn’t looking forward to Thais packing the holes where the knife had gone in with balled-up spider webs she’d gathered from the garage. But she knew what she was doing and that was enough to convince me.
I hissed through my teeth when she packed the infected wound on my thigh.
I watched her, admiring her.
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
Sensing his eyes on me as I worked on his wounds, I raised my head.
“What?” I asked, half-smiling.
“Nothing.” Atticus’ lips turned up on one side.
I blinked.
“Tell me,” I insisted.
He looked down at my hands as they prodded the wound.
“You just amaze me, is all,” he said.
My blush deepened. I dropped my eyes to keep from seeing his, and went back to work.
A moment later: “This is the last of the tape. And the baby wipes. How much penicillin is left?”
Atticus opened the bottle—days ago we’d opened all three and poured the pills into one so there would be less to carry—and he shuffled the pills into the palm of his hand.
As he counted, I noticed right away there were fewer left than there should have been.
“Atticus, there were ninety pills when I found them.” I poked at them in the palm of his hand, and looked up at him suspiciously. “What happened to the rest of them?”
Atticus sighed. “I’ve been taking them.”
“Why?”
He sighed once more. “Just a precaution.”
I examined the puffy, reddened wound again. Then I reached out and touched the inside of my wrist to his forehead, and then both cheeks.
“You’re running fever,” I said with a hint of accusation. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You know why, Thais.”
Resigned, I looked back down at the wound, and went back to mending it, taping down a baby wipe over the top. I was disappointed with Atticus for not telling me, but I couldn’t very well argue his reason—yes, it would have worried me, and it would have been the only thing I could think about, and although there wasn’t anything more I could do than what I had been doing, I still would have carried that extra worry on my back the whole way.
“The penicillin will fight the infection,” I stated, refusing to believe otherwise.
(“It will,” I agreed, refusing to believe otherwise.)
Both of us, I knew deep down, were starting to believe otherwise.
~~~
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
It had been so long since we ate last, that our cheeks were sinking inward, and I could fit my pinky and thumb around my forearm, and there were dark circles under Atticus’ eyes, and neither of us could walk for more than ten minutes without having to stop and catch our breath. And to make matters worse, extreme hunger also brought with it irritability and anger, and so Atticus and I fought about ridiculous things.
And to make matters even worse, hunger made concentration difficult, so Atticus and I fought about ridiculous things we couldn’t even remember.