Gray (Book 3) (18 page)

“Not that I’ve ever heard of. Could be someone is hoarding a package of Tic-Tacs, but I don’t know how we’d find that out.”

“I’ll talk about it if Levi ever gets me that town hall meeting like I want.” She would, too. She’d encourage anyone to donate whatever they might have been hoarding at home that could help a sick person. She wondered if the average person would give up their last piece of spearmint gum. She’d have to think how to guilt them out of it.

Problem for another day. Today, there was Julie, looking sallow. Coral rested her hand on Julie’s forehead, then her neck. “At least the fever seems to be down.”

“I felt better,” said Julie. “Until I felt a lot worse.”

“Open your gown and let me see your chest,” Coral said. She was in a cotton house dress with buttons up the front. Julie unbuttoned her top buttons and Coral pushed aside the material to check her for a rash. There was none. That exhausted what Coral knew about allergies to penicillin, which she thought would be similar to allergies to this sheep-cillin. “I’m sorry you’re sick. But I don’t think it’s serious.” She looked to Edith. “What time is it?”

“About ten.”

So it had been a couple hours since Julie had gotten the shot. A life-threatening reaction would surely have happened sooner. Coral thought she’d probably overdosed the poor women, but not fatally. Still, she wasn’t going to leave Julie’s side any time soon. “I’ll stay here. Edith, you can see the other patients, if you like.” Coral had passed a few in the waiting room, not registering who they were.

“Let me know if you need me,” Edith said, and left the room, carrying the full emesis basin to empty outside.

“I’m sorry you had to wake up and come back,” said Julie.

“Don’t worry about it. How are you feeling otherwise?”

“My foot is about the same. Hurts, but not terrible. Sometimes I stretch my foot, you know, like you’d do after being in bed too long, and I forget I shouldn’t and then—like really ow, then. Otherwise, it’s not bad.”

“Good. You know the old joke, ‘Doc, it hurts when I do this?’”

“Yeah. ‘Then don’t do that.’ My Granddad loved that one.”

“And my Grandmother,” said Coral.

“You miss her?”

“Like—” Coral almost said, “like I’d miss an arm,” but caught herself in time. Way to go, Ms. Bedside Manner, making amputation jokes to the amputee. “Like you wouldn’t believe,” she finished.

Edith came back in to return a clean emesis basin. Julie reached for it and clutched it.

“Still nauseated?” Coral asked.

“It comes in waves. There’s not much left in my stomach at this point.”

“How many times?”

“That was number four.”

“I wonder if something like a cracker—or that flatbread they make in the kitchen—would help or hurt.”

Julie shook her head. “No, I don’t feel like eating.”

“I’m sorry.” And Coral was. She felt guilty for making Julie sick.

As Julie settled back down with a magazine, Coral thought about this. She was dealing with the downstream effects of her half-assed doctoring. But even if she had more training, the problem was, everything she did to a patient—every drug, every procedure—had possible consequences. And then she’d be treating the consequences.

In the old world, that wasn’t awful. Well, no, of course it could be awful. But if you gave a patient nausea with your initial treatment, you simply gave them an anti-nausea drug. If your treatment thickened the blood, you’d give them a blood thinner. This pill gave them edema? A diuretic fixed that. Diuretic lower the blood pressure too much? There’s a drug for that, plus IV fluids.

This was not that world. She didn’t have a fully stocked pharmacy. The drugs she did have, she had to conserve. She couldn’t go giving patients side-effects willy-nilly. Willy-nilly: another of her grandmother’s terms. Whenever she thought of her grandmother, she seemed to channel her for the next hour or two. She missed her.

Back to doctoring. Never before had the admonition to “first, do no harm” seemed more important. Any harm she did, she had to fix. And she didn’t have the tools to fix any of it. So she had to do as little as possible in the first place.

Julie’s toes had been gangrenous. Could she have let them fall off and hoped that Julie didn’t die of a systemic infection?

No. She was sure that surgery was the right choice. Deciding it all over again now made her feel better. She’d made a mistake by upping the antibiotic dose. So maybe she should get her off the antibiotics sooner and hope Julie’s own body could find a way to fight off any remaining infection. Maybe the principle of doing no harm now meant “do as little as you possibly can,” and then let nature take its course.

Even if nature’s course was death?

Coral breathed out an exasperated breath. There was no good answer to any of these problems. She was looking for an overarching philosophy, and maybe there wasn’t one. There was only every moment to live, this one decision to be made, and no way to take it back. Today, there was Julie, squirming a bit in the bed.

“Feeling bad?” Coral said.

Julie nodded, miserably, and then sat up, leaned over, and vomited again. “Any idea when this will stop?”

“It should be soon now.” That was a white lie. Actually, Coral had no idea. Maybe it’d last for six or eight hours. But could it hurt to be optimistic? Maybe there was some placebo effect in play here. “Not long at all,” she said, putting as much confidence as she could into her voice.

Two more times she had to carry a basin of vomit outside. Finally, Julie’s nausea passed. Coral did something no doctor would have done in the old days. She talked about their options openly, with Edith, right in front of Julie. Coral wanted to hear everyone’s opinion and, for once, not lie about her own control over the situation. Screw the rules of the old world that said doctors could not say “I’m not sure.”

In the end, they decided to skip the evening’s dose of antibiotic and go back in the morning to the dose that hadn’t bothered her. If her fever came back, they’d figure out what to do then. If it didn’t, they’d stop the antibiotics three days after the surgery, send Julie home, and see what happened. Coral or Edith would stop by every day, morning and evening, to change her bandage and check on her.

“We’ll stay flexible,” Coral said. “And take the best care of you we can.”

“I trust you,” said Julie.

“Thank you,” said Coral, more guilty than ever that she was living a lie. She might be giving better medical care than anyone else in the town could give, but she wasn’t a doctor. And she was weary of the responsibility that came with the role.

In mid-afternoon, she left to scrounge some food in the kitchen. The chef was alone, working at chopping something with a cleaver, and humming a song. Coral walked toward him, said “Hey,” and he jumped.

“Geez. You startled me,” he said, tossing a clean towel over the food. “What can I do for you?”

“I hate it when people sneak up on me, too,” she said. “I’m hoping I can get something for Julie and I to eat tonight. It doesn’t have to be hot now. We have the stove, so we can warm something there.”

“Sure. Will MREs do?”

“They’re fine.” Preferable, even, with the variety of tastes they offered.

“They’re over here, in this storage room.” He grabbed a lamp and led her to a large closet, not the one she’d taken her bath in the first day here, but a similar space. This had a whole shelf of military meals on it, packaged in that ugly khaki color.

As she hadn’t known there’d be a choice, she had no idea what Julie might want. She picked a chicken-tomato meal and pork chow mein. “Where did these come from?” She had been told but had forgotten.

“A military depot, across the river. They found these in basement storage. They’re old, and some of the baked goods in there have turned, but the main meals seem okay.”

She did a quick estimate. There might be 500 meals in the closet, maybe as many as 600. At two a day, that would support 250 person-days of scavenging. Four person teams went out on three-day trips. These wouldn’t last long—maybe a month. The food on hand for the regular citizens might not last that long. They had a week or two to find a cache of food. “This is the last of them?” she asked.

“I think so, yes.”

She and Benjamin had to leave soon, before the food crisis got any worse. “I appreciate your letting us have the MREs.”

“Anyway. I’m busy,” he said, “and my staff will be here soon, so if you don’t mind.”

“Sure. Sorry to bother you.” She left the kitchen with the two packaged meals and returned to the clinic.

Edith stayed until Coral kicked her out to make the communal meal, and she asked her to drop by her own assigned table and mention to Doug and Abigail where she was. “I don’t want them to worry,” she said. She knew Abigail would be wanting to quiz her about the abortion, but Coral didn’t have anything new to tell her.

Julie’s nausea passed, and the two of them ate the meals together, splitting both and rating the food. The chocolate-covered cookie was inedible, but everything else was okay to really quite good. “Not bad for something nearly as old as us,” said Julie.

Coral fell asleep soon thereafter, in a chair, undisturbed by any small noises Julie was making. She woke with a sore neck. Julie was happily reading a magazine in the lamplight. Coral stretched and said, “Sorry.”

“You need to sleep, too.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay. Not sick. The food’s staying down.”

Coral checked her face for fever, decided she was no hotter than she had been a few hours ago, and then changed the bandage again. The toes looked better still. The skin around the stitches was getting lighter, and Coral felt more confident about them healing.  Maybe Julie’s vomiting hadn’t been too high a price to pay, if the extra antibiotic was speeding the healing process.
Easy for me to say.

“How is it?”

“Better!” Coral was glad to be able to give her patient a real smile. “I’ll check again in the morning, but I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine now.”

Julie said, “Do you think I’ll have much trouble walking?”

“It’d be worse had it been your big toe—or all of them. I think you’ll adjust pretty quickly.” She grew stern. “But don’t try to walk until I give the okay. I want this nice and healed before you try.”

“I’m getting tired of using the bed pan.”

“I’m sure you are.” It wasn’t particularly fun for any of them.

Julie looked at the ceiling for a minute and, still looking up there, said, “I could have died, huh?”

“Yeah. The infection could have spread.”

“I guess it had to be done.”

“In my estimation, yes.”

She sighed. “Okay.”

Coral wondered if Julie was going through some normal emotional swing. She might get resentful next, blame her medical workers, regret letting them amputate. Coral knew she had to be resolved in her own mind to deal with such a phase from Julie, should it arrive. Tissue killed by the cold would not magically regenerate. She would have lost the toes anyway, and the infection could have killed her.

After Julie fell asleep, Coral spent another night reading. She made it through all the books she had borrowed, and she had made a pretty good dent in the medical books on hand. A number of the pages of those were purely reference. She didn’t bother to study anatomy diagrams of animals, but she made sure that she knew where the diagrams of people were if she needed to consult them.

When the morning came, Julie was neither fevered nor nauseated. Her foot looked better still. Coral gave her a light dose of the antibiotics and was relieved to hand the nursing duties over to Edith. She looked forward to getting a long day’s sleep.

It was not to be. Jamie waylaid her as she walked out of the clinic, and she had to follow him to the library.

Levi was flipping through some notes, written on a motley assortment of paper. He didn’t look up immediately, and Coral knew it for a power game. She waited him out.

When he looked up, he met her eyes and looked concerned as he said, “I hear your patient had a set-back.”

There were no secrets in a community this small—certainly not from the man who ran it. “A touch of nausea. She’s healing well, now. I’ll have her off the antibiotics and discharge her soon.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about your very good idea to have a town hall meeting about medical care.”

He hadn’t seemed to think it was such a good idea before. But whatever.

“We really don’t have a room big enough for one meeting. Remember, there’s no way to project your voice over someplace like an empty library floor. So I thought I’d suggest this. We’ll have people come in slightly staggered shifts for an evening meal, and you can go from dining room to dining room and have the talk with each group.” He gave her a wintery smile. “It seems to me the best way to handle it.”

“Okay,” she said, then she remembered to say, “Thank you. What day?”

“How about the day after you release your patient? You’ll want to be well rested, and to have time to write your speech.”

“It won’t be much of a speech, but sure. Also, I had another thought. When Julie was feeling sick, a mint would have made her feel better. Items like that that were once luxury items, seen as candy, might have a medical application. Mints, horehound drops, a restaurant packet of two soda crackers sitting at the bottom of someone’s purse or briefcase. They might not even know they have them, but it would mean the difference between comfort and discomfort for a sick or injured person. It could even mean the difference between vomiting hard enough to tear stitches and not.”

“I doubt if there’s a lot of that thing around. When people were trapped underground, they went through their purses or briefcases a dozen times, looking for food.”

“Probably you’re right. But if I get two sticks of gum, an antacid, and a fuzzy half-roll of mints from it, that’s better than nothing.”

“I’m glad to see you’re so involved in the community, Coral. That’s what makes this place run, you know. People feeling engaged and as if they have an important job. Taking on responsibilities and problem-solving themselves.” He went on in this vein for a few minutes.

Coral substituted the words “rah, rah, rah,” for everything else he was saying and waited for him to wind down. While she did, she wondered what sorts of luxuries he might be hoarding in his over-heated apartment, what he wouldn’t be giving up that might help her patients. She knew better than to say anything, or when Benjamin got back, he’d get put on latrine duty until they left.

“So,” he said. “Two days from now? Or three?”

“Two,” she said. “At supper.” Get the job over before Benjamin was back. Julie would be on the mend, and she’d have a solution—she hoped—for Abigail’s unwanted pregnancy. She’d have improved their store of medicines and mined their collective wisdom about folk medicine. She could leave with a clear conscience.

“I don’t think you’ll get much, but I wish you luck. We don’t have hoarders.”

“Not hoarders. I’m not accusing anyone of a crime. They may not realize they have something important.”

“I understand.”

“Not that they have much. Or the city itself, really. I was noticing the storage in the kitchen.”

His brows drew together. “What were you doing in the kitchen?”

“Grabbing the evening’s meal for myself and Julie. But Chef took me into a pantry, and I couldn’t help but notice how low the stores are getting.”

His eyes had turned flat and angrier with every word she’d said. This man did not like people thinking and acting on their own. “We’ve got it covered.”

“Do you? I’m worried from a medical perspective, of course.”

“Taken care of,” he said. “Now, is there anything else?”

“You asked me to come,” she pointed out. “Do you have anything else for me?”

“No. We’ll get your little home-remedy talks set up.”

Coral knew he meant he’d delegate it. She thought his use of the word “we” was particularly interesting. Sometimes, it seemed to mean him—but he wanted to spread the blame, so he implicated an imaginary group. Sometimes, it meant someone else was willing to do scut work, but he wanted to take credit for the results.

She said, “One last thing. Do you have anyone in mind yet for the book search? I’ve been able to do some reading myself while I’ve stayed up with Julie, but it’d be great to get a second person on it.”

“We’ll check who’s available.”

“Okay.” She left his office, looking forward to a nice, long sleep.

Victoria was waiting for her in her apartment building’s hallway.

Coral stifled a sigh. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t feel good about how we left things the other day. Can I speak with you about it?”

By all means. Let’s sit down while I give
you
therapy about your lack of
closure
. “Come on in,” Coral said, and led her into the living room.

Victoria took a few moments to arrange herself in a chair. She took off a hat and looked around. “Nice place.”

“It’s Doug’s and Abigail’s.”

“Yes. I know. It was Alec and Steph’s before, too.”

“They left? Or died?” Coral had been told, but she had forgotten

“He died,” said Victoria.

“Right, and she moved out, I remember now. So anyway, you feel bad about something?”

“Levi told me to treat you. He said—and I agreed—that you’re having problems with PTSD. While it’s normal for people to think they’re over something when they’re not—”

“Let me stop you. Rest assured, I am not
over
anything. I’ve seen things, done things, and I’m not over them. I haven’t forgotten them. I don’t want to forget them. They’re part of my learning. They’re part of me, now. That’s all.”

“But they were traumatic incidents.”

Coral scrubbed her hand over her face. She felt as if she were talking to someone who only spoke a different language. Or an Alpha Centaurian, maybe, someone from a different solar system altogether. “Sure. But I don’t feel traumatized by them.”

“But you are.”

“Isn’t the very definition of emotional trauma that you
feel
it?” Coral didn’t wait for an answer. “All I feel is tired right now, and slightly impatient with you. I’m fine.”

“I’m sure you’ve been busy. But losing yourself in work isn’t the way to handle this.”

Coral took a deep breath while she formulated her answer. “I get it. You think I don’t get what you mean, but I do. You think I’m in some sort of denial, right?”

Victoria seemed pleased by this. “Exactly.”

“And I’m sure this surprises you, but I think you’re in a sort of denial. You haven’t a clue what it’s like out there. You can’t judge it. You can’t understand it.”

She said, “I know. But I can listen.”

“Sure, you could,” said Coral. “If I wanted or needed to talk about it, you could listen. I can tell you’re good at that, and I appreciate that you’re a nice person who wants to help people. But I don’t need or want to talk about it. And you’ll be listening for the wrong things anyway. What you should be taking from it—what would be smart of you to take from it—is a lesson for yourself. You’re listening with these filters from your training. You’d be listening for clues that I had this or that or the other mental health problem and wondering how to make me cry it all out.”

“I—”

Coral interrupted her. “When what you
should
be listening for is information about how to survive, for yourself. This town will not last forever. Believe me. My life the past six months? That’s your life in the future. You should be figuring out how to survive it.”

“I think you’re wrong. About that, about our town, and about yourself.”

“And I think you’re wrong. We’ll both have to live with that.” Coral stood, thinking, actually, I think you’re going to not live with it. I think, after this place falls to pieces in a month or two—or gets attacked by a stronger force before that—you’re going to die. You don’t have what it takes to last a week out there. Like so many of the people in this town, you’re too mired in the old ways. “Now I really need some rest. I was up with a patient yesterday, and if I’m going to be any good for her tonight, I need to get some sleep.”

Victoria sat for a moment, frowning, and Coral wondered if she was going to have to pick the woman up and physically toss her out. Coral could do it. And Victoria had no idea how to defend herself, unless there were hidden skills from martial arts classes or something in the woman. Coral doubted it, though. She didn’t seem the type. She was a nice person from a nice world, entirely unsuited to the world of today.

Finally, Victoria got up, frowning. “I’ll have to discuss this with Levi,” she said.

“Sure, I understand,” said Coral.

“I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay,” said Coral, hoping she wouldn’t live up to that promise.

After Victoria left, Coral went upstairs. As she fell asleep, she was inventorying all the people she’d met in Boise and deciding which of them had the skills or attitude to survive the life Coral had been living—the life they’d all have thrust upon them when the food and fuel ran out a month from now. She imagined very few of them would survive. The scavenger teams, probably they could, if they lucked into finding game or stored food.

But she could too easily imagine those few she had come to like—Doug and Abigail and Edith—not making it.

Over the next two days, Julie improved and Coral sent her home. Coral was able to switch from feeling anxious about Julie to worrying about Benjamin, who was due to return that day.

And then there was Abigail. She had been patient while Coral focused on her surgical patient, but lines of worry were etching themselves on her face, and before dinner the day she’d gotten Julie settled in bed two floors above the kitchen, Coral reassured Abigail that she was looking for a solution.

“I’m getting morning sickness now. I’m a hundred percent sure I’m pregnant.”

“I could give you a pelvic exam,” Coral said. “But I’ve never given one. If an experienced person could tell you’re a couple weeks pregnant from feel, I couldn’t. I have nothing to compare it to.”

Maybe something would happen that Abigail wouldn’t want to terminate her pregnancy. If a miraculous food find happened, something like a whole train, a hundred cars long, full of canned food, she could carry to term, and before she left Coral would recruit the most experienced mothers to be midwives, Abigail and her baby would be fine.

That was all fantasy, of course, beginning with the unlikely discovery of food. If Benjamin and Kathy’s scavenging party did find something—even a fully stocked Super Walmart—it would only delay the inevitable end. The world as it was could not sustain a town of three hundred for long. Eventually, they’d have to break into small bands, move out in different directions. A few of them with the right skills might find game or fish. Most of them would die of starvation.

It reminded her of another reason that she and Benjamin had to be gone well before that natural end occurred here. They needed to be the first searching out the new areas, and well ahead of the main exodus from the town. A twinge of guilt at her selfishness bothered her—but it would not bother her enough to forfeit her and Benjamin’s survival when the time came.

She wished he’d get back. As she held her series of dining-hall meetings that night about folk medicine, natural remedies, and donating any random pill or mint they might still have, her thoughts kept drifting to Benjamin.

She ate alone, at the end of a long evening, eating only because she knew she had to. It was some mystery meat stew, watery, with not enough salt, and with some dried herb floating in it she didn’t like the taste of. Coral ate it quickly and then took her bowl back to the last two people in the kitchen, who were putting away clean dishes.

She hadn’t ever seen the kitchen area this empty. She knew it was locked at night. If she and Benjamin were to leave soon, they would need food. She needed to keep a closer eye on the kitchen and figure out how to smuggle some MREs from the pantry. She wouldn’t take many—they couldn’t carry many—but enough to give the two of them a fair chance at finding fish or game or a small town grocery store that hadn’t yet been looted.

At home, she sat in the living room, hoping Benjamin would show up, but he didn’t. For the first part of the evening, she had company. Doug had a book with him, a Jane Austen novel. They hadn’t talked Levi into assigning him to the task of hunting for medical tidbits, but he was taking it on anyway in his spare time. From time to time, he’d read aloud a few paragraphs, none of it particularly useful. Gout wasn’t likely to appear in post-disaster Boise. And while Doug might well have an attack of the vapors if he learned of his wife’s pregnancy, Coral thought he’d recover quite easily from them without a whiff of vinegar.

The content of what he read was useless as medicine, but it helped in another way. It took her away, for a moment, to a different world, one were ash did not fill the air, where people could change their clothing every day after servants had washed and pressed it, and where people had time to worry about nonsense like ballroom etiquette rather than survival.