Homefront Hero (18 page)

John ran a lock of her hair through his fingers. “You need your rest. You need it because you’re going to live. Those students? Those socks? They need you.”

Her eyes fell closed, but she smiled.

“I need you.” His voice broke with the power of that truth. Self-sufficient, self-important, self-absorbed John Gallows needed. Perhaps it really was the end of the world.

“But you’ve finished your first sock,” she said, speaking with such a thin calm that he wondered if she was still awake. “You’ll be surprised. The second one is so much easier.”

“I still need you.” He wasn’t talking about socks at all.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I
t burned. Parts of her burned, then cooled, then burned again. The air had grown thick and hard to breathe, hot and liquid against her throat. The scents around her were familiar, yet some part of her knew they were cause for alarm. There were times—hours? days?—when her stomach would feel hollow and still. All of her felt hollow and still, like a water glass emptied out. Then there were the insufferable spaces where time twisted over on itself in pain, where every breath felt like it took hours and filled nothing. Voices and faces would ebb in and out of her awareness. Sometimes she conversed with them, knowing they were friends and yet not being able to place them in her life outside the heat and pain. Other times they were only noises she could not understand.

Days were hard. The bright sunshine hurt her eyes, made the sights and sounds too sharp. For a little while each day, however, the storm would subside and she could be in the world. Feel the cool gauze on her forehead, taste the salty broth someone held to her lips. She was very sick, she knew that, although she wasn’t sure how. Every once in a while, especially when light returned to the room, Leanne would feel something tell her not to fight, not to strive. An inner voice assuring her that whatever this was, it was out of her hands.

She was sure the voice came in the growing light because the dark was so awful. Sleep and wakefulness wove together without clear lines, so that she never knew if her eyes would open to dark or light. In the light there were shapes and movement, but the dark held only sound and space. Once she thought Charles Holling came to her in the darkness, as pale and hollow as she felt. He didn’t plead to die like she remembered, only asked very politely as if he were a gentleman asking a lady to dance. She would tell him she didn’t want to dance, or to die, that John was here somewhere, and then she would turn and look for John in the darkness. She would push her hands out of the fog draped over her, and find the solid warmth of his hand. It was as if she floated, wandered, but his hand would anchor her back whenever she touched it. She’d call his name into the fog, and often his answer would come back like a lighthouse beacon. He held her to this place, to this time, even to this pain. It made her think of John’s accident, hanging over the sea by the dirigible stay wires that both tore him and saved him at the same time. How did she know that? Had she been there to see it? She couldn’t remember. Nothing made sense.

Nothing except God. God made the only sense there was. He was here. She heard His voice, only not in true words. God spoke to her thoughts and breaths, in colors and sensations. All her senses seemed to weave together—sometimes tight and coarse, other times loose and billowy. When the world was tight and coarse, she would feel God beside her, holding, protecting. When the world was loose and billowy, she would feel Him underneath her like the wind under a seagull. The Lord of Time whirled her in and out of time’s grip, the Author of Life pushed and pulled at her breath, the Lamb of God cradled her in her suffering. One set of words kept coming to her, over and over. She knew it to be truth, but couldn’t remember where she’d learned it.
In life or in death I belong to Christ
.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

J
ohn startled awake to a hand on his shoulder, every joint of his body reminding him of the hard floor that had been his bed for two nights. His head turned quickly toward the cot beside him where Leanne lay with her back to him. Was she all right? Had someone woken him to deliver bad news?

The hand squeezed his shoulder in assurance, and John squinted in the sunlight to see Dr. Madison pulling up a metal chair. He looked as tired as John felt.

“She’s still with us,” he whispered, handing John a tin mug of mercilessly strong coffee. “I just checked and her pulse is weak, but steady.”

Hearing their voices Leanne gave a soft moan and shifted a bit, but did not wake. “Even in her sleep,” John said, looking at the too-sharp angle of her shoulder, “she’s in too much pain. She’s barely woken in two days.”

“And you’ve barely slept in two days.” Madison nodded to him over his own cup. “She’ll have my hide if I don’t keep you well enough to celebrate her recovery.” He winced as he swallowed. “This is dreadful. I’m trying to be grateful it’s hot.”

“Thank you.” John gulped down the hot brew with gratitude. Leanne sighed softly. “It’s hard to be grateful for her prolonged pain, but I’m glad she’s still with us.”

“Pain is an odd companion, but try to think of it as the body’s way of fighting to stay alive. They say you never feel a mortal wound, only the one that won’t kill you.”

It was funny how Madison, who had once been the only thing standing in his way, the enemy to be conquered, had become a friend. Unable to sleep, John had talked for an hour to Leanne’s sleeping form in the middle of the night last night about this strange world they now occupied. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” John had said as he wiped Leanne’s hands—still paler by moonlight than their ashen color by day. “Our Dr. Madison, my chief inflictor of therapeutic pain, has become a source of comfort. A friend, if you can believe it.”

He liked talking to her when the room was dark. Sleep eluded him anyway, and he hoped his monologue kept Leanne anchored to this world where he needed her to stay. “I hardly know what to do with this topsy-turvy exchange of blessings and curses. They seem to turn my world upside down and set it to rights all at the same time. If this is the world with your faith, I almost think I’d rather have something more constant and predictable.” He’d fallen asleep fingering the gold cross they’d taken from her neck, now his constant companion in his pocket. It was still in his hand now as he stared bleary-eyed at Madison.

“I have news, John.” Madison had never called him John in all their time together. “Boston has reported a survivor.”

John sat up straight, for this was news indeed. There had been no reports of anything but fatalities from any of the camps. John had stopped watching patients being brought into the hospital, unable to stomach the fear in their eyes. Every person believed the trip through those doors ran only one way. The only variable so far was the rate of death—some died shockingly fast, others lingered cruelly for days. “Someone has lived?”

Madison took off his glasses and pinched his nose. “It is perhaps more accurate to say someone has not died. A single soldier. His fever has resolved. It’s not much, but it’s more than we’ve had to go on before.”

Someone had not died. It was far more than anything they had before. John let his head fall back against the wall, glad to grasp even a thin hope of relief. “Thank God above.”

“I thought you’d want to know.” He managed a weary smile. “I thought it might convince you to actually sleep. I am still your doctor, you know.” Madison drained the tin mug with a groan of displeasure. “I’ll sit with her if you like.”

“You’ll do no such thing from the looks of both of you,” came Ida’s voice from the doorway. “I’ve a mind to ship the both of you off to some pantry and lock the door.” She crossed her arms like a scolding schoolmarm. “When’s the last time either of you ate?”

“I think I just chewed this coffee.” John surprised himself with his first joke in ages. Someone hadn’t died. The hourglass could be turned.

“I thought as much. Besides, I’m going to give Leanne a bit of a bath so you’re to be gentlemen and flee the room. Off with the pair of you.”

“Bacon and eggs,” Madison wished aloud as he rose slowly from his chair. “Four of them, with hash browns and fresh strawberries.” He extended a hand to John, who was still propped up against the wall on the floor.

“Eggs Benedict,” John managed through gritted teeth as his leg—and the rest of him—loudly protested the night’s sleeping quarters. “With perfect toast—” a wince cut through his words “—and orange marmalade. And ham. And real coffee, not whatever
that
was.” John fetched his cane but left the cup of murky black liquid on the floor. He looked at Ida’s barely amused face. “They’ve a survivor up in Boston, you know. Madison just told me.”

“It’s all over campus already.”

John leaned over Leanne’s discolored face, saddened to see her eyes seemed to have sunk farther into their hollows overnight. She was thinner still, ashen where she wasn’t the harrowing purple that marked this disease. She had quieted overnight—he preferred to think of it that way, simply as a quieting, rather than entertain the notion she was weakening. Still, her brow wrinkled in discomfort, and her body lacked the peaceful ease of true sleep. He smoothed a damp lock of hair off her forehead, saddened to find it still warmer than it should be. “There’s a survivor up in Boston, my dear. Someone can survive. Someone
has
survived. Stay right here with us where you belong.” He kissed her cheek before pulling his mask back up, then nodded to Ida. “Find her some yarn. She’ll want it for when she wakes up.”

After a breakfast that rivaled any half-edible gruel John had endured in the battle trenches, he ignored the rock settling in his stomach and settled down for a stretch of real sleep. An hour in an actual bed, horizontal, on something that wasn’t a floor, felt like a luxury. After that he was up, shaven and back at work in the small room in one of the adjacent inner quarantine buildings he’d commandeered as his “office.”

Colton walked in halfway through the morning. John hadn’t seen the man in almost a full day, since Travers had fallen ill shortly after Leanne. To see such a hardworking young man laid low was bad enough, but it served to make Colton and John doubly anxious about the state of the contagion.

Colton looked calm enough, so John ventured, “How’s Hank?”

The big man shook his head. “Not good. Fella’s just a whip of a thing, so it’s hit him hard. They got him in the ‘big room.’”

The “big room,” as Colton called it, was a sea of misery on the first floor of the “hospital” dormitory, a vast ward of bodies in various states of the disease. Every time John walked by it he offered up a prayer of thanks that Leanne was tucked away in a ward on the upper floors. He wouldn’t state it now, but to him the “big room” seemed like it smothered its occupants in a sheer mass of death.

“Hank’s a tough fellow,” John offered.

“And your Miss Sample?” The romance between John and Leanne had become common knowledge. It was hard to have any privacy in such close quarters, and the urgency of their world right now wouldn’t allow for much subtlety. John took a novel pride in claiming her as “his,” through a look, a quick touch of her hand in public places, the use of endearments. It was an odd thing: John used to pride himself on his ability to woo the most desirable lady in any crowd, often seeking her out for the mere challenge of besting other gentlemen. Now, as his mother would have put it, he “only had eyes for one.”

“She’s still with us,” he quoted Dr. Madison with a deep gratitude. “With plans to stay that way. Boston is reporting a survivor, did you hear?”

Colton smiled. “I did. Camp Devens has just one so far?”

“That’s all I’ve heard, but that’s all I need to hear.” John had shared the news with every ear that would listen, but he knew Colton held Travers as a friend. “Madison’s sent word for more information from the doctors at Devens, but nothing’s come through yet.”

“Maybe there ain’t nothing to tell. Some things just
is,
you know.” John wasn’t sure if Colton was offering encouragement or kindly caution. The big man didn’t elaborate, just looked at the pile of pipes and mattresses at John’s feet and raised an eyebrow. “What have you got going here?”

Fortified by food, sleep and hopeful news, John was attempting something that felt no less miraculous than Christ’s loaves and fishes. “I’m attempting to see if one bed can somehow be reassembled into two. Or even two into three.”

He pulled apart the mattress he’d unstitched into two layers of batting. “Maybe we can just put these on boards nailed to a pair of desks.” The dormitory mattresses were thin to begin with, but no one was seeking luxury here. “I think we can split the wire mesh up into two, but I’m not sure it will hold.”

“Won’t hold me.” Colton chuckled. “Then again, you could fit some of them boys in each of my pant legs, they’s coming in here so thin.”

John could only agree. Each day the incoming patients looked more ill—and more frightened than the last. “Philadelphia was fool enough to hold a liberty bond parade and they ended up with hundreds of cases. Here, hold this,” he said, pointing to wire mesh he’d just unwoven from a disassembled bed.

“Locking us up tight was the smart thing to do then. Only it don’t feel so smart from the inside, does it? My heart jumps through my mouth every time I cough even just a little.”

John, Colton and every healthy person inside “the line,” as it had come to be called, lived in the same state of watch: Have I caught it? Is this the first sign? The constant vigil had worn John’s mind down to a near numbness, but in sleep, his imagination roused again, in the worst of ways. “I dreamed of being chased by a huge tiger, nipping at my heels while I ran through a jungle.” He began threading a screw through a hole in a pipe.

“A tiger?” Waters chuckled. “Not a little bird?”

News wires reported a day ago that as alarm had been raised in the general public, children had begun jumping rope to a macabre little rhyme:

I had a little bird

Her name was Enza

I opened the window

And In-Flu-Enza

It was amusing and horribly sad at the same time.

“No, a big snarly tiger. You’d think I’d enjoy a dream of running, the way I hobble around.”

Colton picked up one corner of John’s new invention, inspecting the thing. “Did you outrun the tiger in your dream?”

“Woke up in a cold sweat before I could find out.” While the sensation of running should have felt wonderful, John would have gladly passed it over to skip bolting upright out of the nap with his heart pounding.

“Well, then, how’s about we say you outran that nasty tiger and saved your pretty girl, too? Sounds like a mighty fine dream to me when you put it that way.”

John had to smile. “I thought you said some things ‘just is’?”

“Well,” said Colton as he handed the wrench to John to tighten the bolt, “I didn’t say ‘all things.’ Well, now, looky here. This just might work.” John showed him how the two salvaged sides came together to hold a mattress. “You are pretty smart for a war hero, Captain Gallows.”

John smiled at his contraption. “If you can’t outrun the tiger, you’d best outsmart him.”