Capture (30 page)

Tarah shrugged.
“I know as much as you do about what Clann people can and can’t do.”

A breeze stirred through the pines, making them sigh and sway.
As the breeze passed us, it brought with it the scent of the freshly cut firewood and pine sap.

Tarah shivered.
I threw an arm around her shoulders and grinned. “You’re getting cold. Let’s grab some firewood and get back inside before you turn into a human popsicle. I don’t want a girlfriend with ugly, frostbitten toes.”

She gasped and whapped my shoulder.
“You’d just have to learn to like me anyway. ‘Cause I don’t want a boyfriend who’s too shallow to like a girl with frostbitten toes.”

“
I would not like you with frostbitten toes.” At the firewood stack now, I loaded her arms with a small pile of wood then filled mine with chopped logs up to my chin.

“
You really wouldn’t?” Her eyebrows drew together.

“
Nope.” Leading the way back towards our house, I added in a murmur, “I’d
love
you. Even with fugly toes.”

Grinning, she pushed me away with her shoulder.
“You’d better.”

“
Think we’ll ever get everyone out of the living room so we can get some sleep tonight?” she whispered as we awkwardly navigated our house’s stairs and storm door. The scent of pine from the fresh cut logs inches from our faces was nearly overwhelming now.

I managed a shrug without dropping any of the firewood.
“Eventually.”

Once inside, we toed off our snow boots then dumped the logs by the fireplace and shucked our coats.

Cassie sniffed the air. “Mmm, pine trees! Smells like Christmas.”

Which had been a touchy group subject at Grandma Letty’s.
Our group’s religious preferences were too diverse for it to be a good idea to have Christmas trees in the main areas of any of the temporary homes, even though Christmas was just two days away now. But each family was welcome to decorate their bedrooms if they wanted to. I’d spotted a couple of fathers cutting baby pine trees earlier this evening. The sight of those puny trees had reminded me of the Charlie Brown Christmas movie Damon used to insist we watch on DVD every Christmas Eve.

But Tarah and I didn’t even have a room of our own to decorate.
I was starting to see the point in Grandma Letty’s argument for private rooms for us now. Did Tarah miss having a tree to decorate with presents underneath it?

I turned to ask her about it but got distracted in the process.
Bud, who we’d almost forgotten about in the recliner a few feet away, moaned in his sleep, his head turning to one side then the other.

Nightmares?

I watched him for a few seconds, then looked at Pamela in the kitchen area. “Is it time for another dose?”

“
No, he shouldn’t wake up for at least another couple of hours,” she replied with a frown. She dried her hands on a dish towel then took the three steps over to Bud’s chair. “He looks a little flushed.” She touched his forehead and hummed. “He’s running a fever. Let me get my kit.”

She was gone in her family’s bedroom for a few minutes, returning with what looked like an ordinary women’s shoulder bag.
From it she took out an electronic thermometer, the kind with a short wand on one end topped by a white plastic ball. She slowly ran it across Bud’s forehead then froze.

I didn’t like her body language.
I walked over to see the reading for myself then silently swore. Bud’s temperature was a hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t have to be a doctor to figure out that wasn’t good.

CHAPTER 18

“
A
problem with the sedatives maybe?” I murmured, my mind racing. This was not a complication we needed right now. We needed to be able to send him home tomorrow with no memories of this place so we could focus on getting our new community through the winter.

“
Maybe a reaction to them? He’s been on them off and on all week. Maybe his body’s signaling he’s had enough?” Pamela said.

Sweat beaded on Bud’s forehead and upper lip, trickling down the gullies of his weathered face.
He moaned again through lips that looked dry enough to crack soon.

“
What should we do?” I asked.

Pamela shook her head.
“If his fever was a little lower, I’d say just cover him up, monitor his temp and let the fever break on its own. But a hundred and two is pretty high. We need to cool him off. A lukewarm bath might help, and I’ve got some acetaminophen we can give him. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to try more aggressive methods.”

“
Master bath, or the other?” Every house had the same layout with two full baths at either end. The master bathrooms had larger garden tubs.

“
Master bath,” she said. “I’ll set up a pallet in the bedroom too. We can keep Bud there for the night so I can monitor him without having to wake everyone else. Plus, it’s flu season. If that’s what this is, things could get messy soon.”

Meaning Bud might start vomiting.
Great. And the flu was pretty darn contagious too.

“
Maybe Cassie should bunk with Tarah and me in here tonight?” Tarah and I only took up two of the U-shaped couch’s sections, so Cassie could have a whole section to herself.

Pamela nodded, her face grim.
“Let’s hope it isn’t the flu, though. If it is, it’ll spread fast and we’ll have a rough few days till I can catch up to it and get everyone healed. Normally the flu only takes me about an hour or two to detox out of a person’s system, but since it’s so contagious and with the housing situation being what it currently is…”

I looked around us, trying to see the situation through Pamela’s point of view.
She was right. The central air and heat might not be working, but everyone’s bedroom doors were open to allow the heat from the fireplace to warm them. Making this house one big box of communal germs. If Bud was contagious, every person in this house had already been exposed.

“
I’ll tell everyone to stay in the house away from the others tonight just in case,” I said. “At least that will contain it to just this house. We’ll know more tomorrow whether he’s contagious, right?”

She nodded.

“
Alright. If he is, we’ll do an official quarantine then.”

“
Sounds good.” Pamela bent down and lifted Bud’s arm as if she planned to haul him off to the bathtub herself.

“
Mike and I’ve got this.” I took Bud’s arm from her then called out for Mike. He hopped up from the living room floor by the coffee table to join us. “Bud’s sick,” I explained. “We need to get him into the master tub to cool him down.”

Mike grabbed Bud’s other arm, and between the two of us, we managed to haul the unconscious man up out of the chair, through the kitchen, through the master bedroom past two metal frame bunk beds and a startled Steve who was reading in bed, and into the master bath.
We set Bud on the linoleum covered steps that edged the garden tub. Mike held him upright while I got Bud shucked down to his underwear. Pamela brought a few buckets of room temperature water plus one pot of warmed water to fill the tub a few inches. Once she gave the go-ahead, Mike and I managed to lift Bud over the lip of the tub and into the lukewarm water.

I tried not to think about how similar this was to arranging that dead cop’s body behind the steering wheel of his car.

As soon as he was in the water, Bud began to shake. And yet he still didn’t open his eyes.

“
What the heck are you doing?” Steve asked from the doorway behind us.

“
The bus driver’s sick,” Pamela said. “We’ve got to get his fever down. He’ll be sleeping in our room tonight.” She wasn’t asking his permission and clearly didn’t care about her husband’s opinion on the subject.

I kept my back turned toward Steve to hide my grin.
Pamela was a lot stronger than her tiny frame looked.

“
What about Cassie? I don’t want her to get—” Steve began.

“
She’ll be sleeping in the living room tonight,” Pamela said, leaning over to dip a washcloth in the water so she could cool off Bud’s face and neck.

“
I want her out of this house. Now,” Steve said.

“
There’s no telling how long this man has been running a fever,” Pamela said. “If he’s contagious, she’s already been exposed, along with you and me and everyone else in this house. We need to try and keep this contained if we can. We don’t even know what it is yet.”

Steve cursed loudly.
“I told you this might happen. If Cassie gets sick—”

“
Then I’ll heal her, just like I always do every year during flu season.” Pamela’s voice was still firm but turning tense at the edges. “Let’s just see what this is first before we start panicking, okay?”

Growling, Steve turned and stomped off.

Pamela sighed.
“Hayden, can you call your grandma and see if this could be a reaction to the sedatives? We won’t give him any more just in case, but there might also be something we can give him to counter the reaction, if that’s what this is.”

“
Yep, I’m on it.” I’d left my phone in my truck, so I headed through the house towards the front door now. But what I found in the living room made me instantly change direction.

“
Steve, stop,” Tarah said, keeping her voice low as she stood behind Cassie, holding onto the little girl’s shoulders. “You know her mother doesn’t want her to go.”

“
What do you know about my family’s business?” Steve snarled. “And she’s
my
kid. I’ll take her wherever I want! Now let her go.” He wasn’t dumb enough to touch Tarah yet, settling for tugging at one of his daughter’s hands.

“
Pamela,” I called out, crossing over to stand at Tarah’s side and add my hand to Cassie’s other shoulder so we both had a hold on her. The kid was shaking, but she made no attempt to be free. Instead, she’d actually grabbed Tarah’s shirt tail with her free hand and was leaning back against us as if for support or comfort.

“
Steve, what do you think you’re doing?” Pamela cried out as she entered the living room.

“
I’ve got to get her out of here,” Steve said. “Can’t you see how dangerous this place is for her? Don’t you want her to be safe?”

“
She is safe, Steve,” Pamela said, moving to stand in front of her daughter. She reached out, and I thought she was going to try and tear Cassie’s hand free from Steve’s grasp. But Pamela simply laid her hand on top of theirs. “Please calm down and think about this logically.”

Several people poked their heads out through their doorways, then came all the way out into the hallway to watch.
Part of me worried that our new audience would cause more trouble. The other part of me hoped they might serve as backup if Steve resorted to Clann abilities I might have never seen before.

“
Logic? There’s nothing illogical about my thinking here,” Steve said. “That man is sick in there, and now you want all of us to get sick too.”

“
It’s probably just the sedatives,” I said, working to keep my voice calm and reasonable when all I really wanted to do was punch the crap out of this man then kick him out of the village before he started a group wide panic.

“
Exactly,” Pamela said. “Too much sedatives, and he just needs to sleep them off. Worst case scenario, it’s the flu, and he’ll be sick for a few days then right as rain afterward, and I can detox anyone else who gets it in a matter of hours. There’s no more danger to any of us here than if we were back home and one of Cassie’s classmates or our coworkers came down with it.”

“
The flu?” someone murmured in the hallway.

“
Yeah, the flu,” I barked, fast losing my patience. “Everyone gets it every year. You feel like crap for a few hours while Pamela detoxes you, then you’re back to normal. It wouldn’t be the end of the world here, people.” Geez, they acted like we had no healers and were incapable of reaching the town a few miles away if necessary.

“
But the flu’s really contagious,” someone else said. “And people die from it every year.”

“
If they’re already weak and don’t get help,” Pamela countered. “I’m not the only healer in this group, and the city’s got a good hospital just a few miles away if needed. I’ve treated the flu in my family every year. There’s really no need to panic. Steve, you know I can handle healing someone with the flu. How many times have I taken care of you when you came down with it?”

Steve shook his head.
“But that was when we lived in town—”

That was it.
I’d had enough. “Steve, cut the crap. You know this is really just about you wanting to take your family away from here. Tell the truth and quit trying to scare everyone.”

Silence in the hallway as the attention shifted back to Steve.

His eyes narrowed as his scowl deepened. “Yeah, I want my family out of here. Why wouldn’t I? You think I should be happy having to share a house with other families? And now we’re probably going to be quarantined in here too.”

“
That’s true about the quarantine,” I said, figuring we might as well get this issue out in the open as a household now. “That’s just to keep the flu, if it’s even that, from spreading to the other houses. Why risk getting other people sick if we can avoid it? It’d be no different than if each of us was back home and someone in our family got sick. Except here our family’s a little bigger, right?” I looked at the people in the hallway, deliberately making eye contact with everyone. Debate class was finally starting to prove useful after all.

I saw the few worried faces in the hall relax and a couple of heads nod.
They were starting to see reason again instead of panicking.

Taking a deep breath, I turned back to Steve.
“Now as for taking your family away, I think it’s obvious that your wife wants to stay. Cassie, what do you want to do?” I knew I was putting the kid in an awful position, but I wanted everyone in this house to be real clear on what could seem a muddy issue of parental rights.

“
Daddy, please can we stay?” Cassie’s voice was shaky with tears. “I like it here. And in the spring you can build us our own house with a yard and flowers and everything.”

I saw Steve flinch, his eyebrows drawing together.

“How about it, Steve?” I murmured. “She’s right about building your own house. These mobile homes are just temporary. Come spring time, everybody’s going to be free to build their own homes here. Heck, you can get started right now if you want to brave the cold and deal with the snow and frozen ground.”

“
Can we stay, Daddy? Please?” Cassie whispered, pulling away from Tarah and me so she could grab her father’s hand with both of hers.

Steve crouched down in front of her.
“But sweetie, don’t you miss your school and your friends?”

“
Nope,” Cassie didn’t even hesitate to answer. “I’ve got better ones here. Even if they do cheat at Monopoly.”

Mike snickered in the kitchen.
He tried to turn it into a cough.

After a long minute, Steve sighed.
“Fine. I guess we’ll stay. For a few months, at least. But Pamela, you’ve got to promise, if this flu thing gets out of control...”

Pamela nodded.

Feeling the tension in the air fade, I stepped around Steve and Cassie so I could talk to the other families. “So listen, like Pamela said, we need to be safe and quarantine the house till we know for sure what’s going on with the bus driver. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck inside the house. If you get restless and want to go outside, feel free. Just make sure you don’t go visiting the other houses, don’t let them come into this house, don’t trade stuff with them, and if you talk to them outside, avoid touching them or standing too close while you talk so you don’t spread any possible germs.”

“
When will we know for sure what it is?” One of the men asked, and I realized I didn’t even know the names of all my housemates yet.

“
Pamela says we should know by tomorrow.”

Nodding, they drifted back to their rooms.

Satisfied the general panic was over, I turned to find Tarah standing behind me.

“
I’ve got to go grab my phone from the truck,” I told her, reaching for my coat and boots. “Want to go with me?”

She nodded, and once she was ready, we went outside, walking fast, the snow crunching loudly beneath our feet.

We wove our way through the tree stump obstacle course to my truck. I found myself wishing I’d started building that tiny house back at my grandma’s. Then maybe Tarah would have had a house of her own now away from all the drama and possible virus infection.