I decide to change the subject. “I think your leg might be broken. But...”
“But what?”
I broke my arm when I was ten. It was bent at a weird angle and his leg doesn’t look like that. Swollen, yes. Bruised, absolutely. But I didn’t notice any bumps that would indicate the bone snapped. Though he did step in a bear trap. I flip to the front of the book, where my mother wrote the acronym RICE: rest, ice, compression, elevation. Rest, ice, and elevation he could do. But the ACE bandages are out in the shed with some other supplies, so compression might have to wait.
“The sun’s going down. You okay to stay put until tomorrow?”
No, Jamie, shut up!He can’t stay here; he’s a stranger who could kill me and take everything.
Andrew’s face lights up. “On this comfy couch? Hell yeah.” Then his smile drops. “Why are you helping me, Jamison?”
Do no harm.It was my mother’s catchall for “be nice to people.” And now I can picture her giving me that Jamison-what-did-I-tell-you? look. I’m helping him because it’s the right thing to do. Although the world’s different now. Therightthing to do might change from person to person. Andrew’s right thing might be to kill me while my back is turned.
“I guess I just hope you’d do the same for me.”
His eyes drop away from mine, so maybe he wouldn’t. Then something comes to me.
“Oh! Hold on.”
Andrew jumps, his attention returning to me, but I’m already out of the room, heading down the hall toward the linen closet. I move the sheets so I can see the safe I hid on the back of the top shelf—where even my five-foot-eight mother couldn’t reach it—and enter the code. The first thing I see when the door swings open is the dark outline of the handgun that makes me so nervous. I push it aside andtake out the large orange pill bottle.
Back in the living room, I shake out two pills and hold them out to Andrew.
“What are these?” he asks, taking them from me and holding them in his palm.
“Painkillers. The good ones.”
Andrew looks back to the hallway. “Why weren’t they with your other supplies?”
Because my mom tore the house apart looking for them when the vomiting started. She knew what was coming. It’s usually the fever that kills, but everything before that is pure agony.
My mom was trying to avoid all that pain, so she told me what we would do if we got sick. Take as many of the painkillers as we could stomach and drift off to sleep. But I kept thinking what would happen if we were different from the other victims of the superflu; immune or just lucky. They were saying a virus this deadly could mutate to become less lethal as infection went on.
I didn’t want her to give up, and I didn’t want to be alone. So I hid them. In the tank of the toilet, first. It was a sick kind of irony that she was throwing up so close to them for so long, all the way up until she couldn’t get out of bed. Then I put them in the safe.
I tell Andrew a lie, because he doesn’t need to know everything that happened before he came here. “My mom kept them there. Probably doctor training or something. I’ll get you some water and ice for your leg.”
I head into the kitchen—cutting through the dining room and picking up the empty glass I gave him—but he calls out, “It’s okay, Jamison! I can dry swallow them.”
Great, so he can choke to death on the horse pills and I’ll have to carry another dead body out to the firepit. The thought threatens to rain sadness on whatever brightness Andrew’s presence brings. Having him here is giving me something to do other than count my food and worry about hunting.
When I get to the living room the pills are gone, but I still hand him the glass and a towel and a two-gallon-size ziplock bag of ice. He looks at the water, then places it on the coffee table. I tell him to wrap the bag in the towel and lay his leg on top. He winces as he does so, but doesn’t howl in pain.
“I should probably make some dinner. You’re supposed to take those with food. I’ll get you some sweats to put on, too.”
“Jamison, wait.”
I turn back and he is leaning up on his elbows. He motions his head toward the door.
“Can you grab my pack for me?”
I pick up the backpack and bring it over to him, letting him search through it. He pulls out some dirty clothes and sets them in his lap, along with a pack of Band-Aids, a dirty toothbrush, toothpaste, a small Nalgene of water, and a lighter.
“Here we go.” He takes out three cans one by one and hands them over to me. Garbanzo beans, olives, and vegetable soup.
“No, this is your food, you keep it.”
“You help me, I help you. And since I don’t have medical training, this is what you get. Oh... and these.”
