Alone, Book 3: The Journey (16 page)

     She held the bottle just below the side of the bunk and placed the end on Dave’s shattered lips.

     “Take small sips. I’m still not sure whether you’re bleeding internally. If you are, water could be dangerous.”

     After three sips, he was able to manage, “And dying of thirst isn’t?”

     He tried to smile but it hurt and he thought better of it.

     Come to think of it, everything he did hurt.

     Even breathing.

     Red said, “You’re not gonna want to hear this, but I’ve got to elevate your head. Just a bit. The good news is, it’ll help the blood from your broken nose drain, and will make it easier to sip your water.

     Dave was in no position to argue.

     Red, a rough and tumble fireball to this point, showed Dave she had a gentle side as well. She tenderly slipped her hand under his head and lifted it, as she slowly tucked a pillow beneath it.

     “I had to steal this from another truck. You threw up all over the one that was here before.”

     That explained the taste of vomit in the back of Dave’s throat.

     From his newly elevated position, Dave glanced down with his good eye and noticed for the first time he was completely naked.

     Except for the third of his body that was now covered in bandages.

     Red laughed when she saw the movement of his eyes, then the look of alarm on his face.

     “Oh, stop it. I was once a nurse. I’ve seen my share of naked men.”

     She could have stopped there, but she couldn’t help but needle the city slicker.

     “And by the way, I’m not impressed.”

     She smiled an evil grin, meaning to cheer him up just a little.

     It worked.

     He smiled.

     He noticed what looked like a magazine wrapped around his forearm and gave her a puzzled look.

     Red appeared to be just as adept at reading minds as she was at tending to wounds.

     “It’s called a field splint. After you set a broken limb, you use whatever you have to immobilize it. If you don’t have the materials to make a proper cast, you use whatever you have available. A magazine, wrapped around an arm and taped with duct tape, makes a pretty good cast. And it keeps you from damaging it more by moving it around.”

     “Where?”

     The single word, weakly and squeaky, left a lot to interpretation.

     “Where what, Dave? Where are you? Planet earth, and still among the living. You’re pretty darn lucky to be here if you ask me.

     “Where did I get the bandages? From the trucker’s cargo strap box. A lot of truckers carry some pretty impressive first aid kits. Sometimes they come across some pretty gruesome accidents on the highways, and they save a lot of lives.”

     She caught herself.

     “At least they did, before the world went black.”

     She smiled slyly.

     “This particular trucker had a pretty impressive pharmacy in the glove box, too.”

     She held up a bottle of prescription pills.

     Dave couldn’t make out the tiny words, so she helped him out.

     “Percocet. It’s a heavy duty painkiller. Of course, it’s a year and a half old, but it’s still better than acetaminophen. Do you want some?”

     Dave managed a weak nod.

     “Good. Because you already had some. I crushed two tablets into powder and put it under your tongue to dissolve while you were out.”

     She saw a mild look of panic on his face.

     “Oh, relax. If I wanted to do you harm, I’d have just left you to deal with Savage and his cronies on your own. Besides, be glad I gave it to you. If you think you hurt now, just imagine how bad it would be without the Percocet. I’ll give you another one in an hour. It’ll help you sleep.”

     He looked at her blankly.

     “What? No more questions? Aren’t you gonna ask me how my afternoon went?”

     Dave smiled and nodded.

     “Well, thank you for asking. My afternoon flew by. I put your new alternator on for you. It appears to be working fine. I put the dry battery in the back of the Explorer. I still don’t understand why you need it. I suppose we can pick up some acid in another town and use it for a backup.”

     Dave managed to raise an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

     Instead, he quietly asked himself a question:

    
Am I hallucinating, or did she just say ‘we?’

Chapter 32

     “Here. Put this under your tongue until it dissolves. Don’t try to swallow it, or you might choke on it.”

     He didn’t even ask her what it was, or why she was giving it to him.

     That made her feel better. He was starting to trust her after all.

     So she told him even though he didn’t ask.

     “No, this isn’t more pain medicine. It’s too early for that. At some point you’ll wake up after midnight, and you’ll be hurting way more than you are now. I’ll give you some then.

     “This is something to help you sleep. But before you nod off, I have to scoot you back some so there’s room for me.”

     She laughed at the look on his face.

     “Oh, relax, lover boy. You’re not my type. But this is the only mattress for at least two miles and I need my sleep too.”

     She struggled to move him over, toward the small hole he’d beaten into the back wall of the sleeper. It was only the previous night, but it seemed like years had passed.

     There wasn’t a lot of space. The mattress was narrower than a single bed.

     But Dave, for his part, helped move as much as he could despite the agony.

     It was the least he could do, he knew, for the woman who saved his life.

     Red winced each time he did, as though she were trying to take some of the pain away from him. And by the time they were done, she had tears in her eyes to match his own.

     His tears were from the pain. Hers were from the empathy. She hated to hurt him.

     But she knew that unless both of them got a full night’s sleep, they’d be much more vulnerable to whatever perils awaited them the next day.

     And she honestly didn’t know what Savage and his band of hoodlums would do when they searched north of Blanco and didn’t find her and the stranger.

     He would more than likely give up.

     She hoped.

     But John Savage was a loose cannon by anybody’s definition.

     And he didn’t like being made a fool of.

     He also didn’t like it when someone got the better of him.

     Red had done both.

     And in the process of doing so, she’d worn out her welcome in Blanco.

     She was born and raised in the tiny town.

     Went to school there, fell in love, and married her high school sweetheart. Even had a son.

     Neither her husband, nor her son, survived the first month of the newly darkened world.

     After her family died, it was just her and her father.

     Her father died six months later.

     The town’s only doctor said it was a massive heart attack.

     But the doctor was under the thumb of John Savage, and Red suspected it was something else.

     Something more sinister.

     Savage owed his very life to the fact that Red couldn’t prove anything. If she’d been able to, she’d have made sure that Savage had died a very slow, and very painful death.

     It was ironic that Red had more of a sense of right and wrong than the man who wore the badge and carried the title of police chief.

     Once Dave was moved, Red found a sheet and examined it.

     “It seems to be reasonably clean,” she announced.

     She draped it tenderly over Dave’s lower body.

     “As I said, I was once a nurse. Naked bodies don’t bother me. But I thought I saw your cheeks blush when you realized you were naked. I’m not sure. Because it was hard to even see your cheeks through all the scrapes and blood.

     “But if you did blush, that’s a good thing. It means you’re modest and a gentleman. I think we’ll get along just fine.”

     At that moment she finally took off the Stetson she’d worn since the first time Dave laid a swollen eye on her. A cascade of shoulder length red hair rolled out from beneath the hat.

     She looked at Dave and grinned.

     “Yes, now you know why they call me Red. And the first time you make an
I Love Lucy
joke, I’ll punch you square in the mouth.”

     She crawled onto the edge of the bunk, fully clothed and with her back to Dave, and laid her Remington on the floor of the compartment where she could reach it in a hurry.

     “Sleep well, my new friend. We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”

Chapter 33

     Red was wrong.

     Dave didn’t wake up during the night with his body wracked with pain.

     Rather, his body seemed to sense that in order to heal, his rest was what he needed. Even more than the merciful pain medicines he’d be begging her for in the morning.

     Red, on the other hand, was up before the crack of dawn.

     She’d gone out in the darkness, using the night vision goggles Dave had left on the passenger seat the day before.

     She’d never seen any before, but quickly guessed what they were. When she turned them on and donned them, she looked around her in amazement, examined her hand in front of her face, even looked down at her bare feet and spread her toes to see if she could count them.

     She summed up the instrument in one word: “Cool!”

     When she realized she’d spoken the word aloud, she quickly turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at Dave, hoping she hadn’t disturbed him.

     But he hadn’t even heard her.

     She’d heard him periodically throughout the night, wincing in pain each time his arm or leg moved. She noticed that the swelling in his face had actually increased since the beating, as his body started the process of healing.

     That was to be expected, as was the bruising which had darkened just a bit.

     He seemed to be breathing a bit easier. His body had adapted to the broken ribs by taking shallower, but more rapid breaths. It wasn’t worrisome to Red, although it might have been to someone who didn’t know it was just the body’s way of trying not to expand the bruised lungs to the point they pressed against the damaged ribs.

     He wasn’t spitting blood, and he’d stopped blowing it from his nostrils.

     Red was pretty sure the blood that came from his nose earlier was from the broken nose itself. The lungs were surely badly bruised, but likely not punctured.

     She felt his abdomen. It wasn’t quite as hard as it was after she first checked him several hours before. And it wasn’t warmer than the rest of the body.

     She was pretty sure his efforts to protect his midsection during the beating paid off. She wrote off internal bleeding as one of her worries.

     She agreed with his own body’s assessment. What Dave needed more than anything was rest. And time. Time to heal, time to adjust, time to think before doing stupid things like walking into a small town in broad daylight and start taking things.

     She put on her socks and boots, placed her hat back upon her head, and slowly opened the driver’s side door.

     Once outside the rig she stretched and looked up and down the lonely highway.

     She was still amazed at how well she could see with Dave’s goggles, and wished she’d bought her own pair before the blackout.

     And she was still wondering how Dave, who seemed like a nice enough guy but no candidate for Mensa, could figure out how to save the goggles. And also his Explorer, from being destroyed by… whatever had wiped out all the machines and vehicles in Blanco.