“Alright, alright,” I say, trying to calm her, but she continues to paw at me and try to drag me to her husband.
“Did you get the medicines?” she asks, her voice desperate.
Then August steps into the cabin behind me. Charlotte glances at him but quickly looks away again, almost like she’s embarrassed. Then she turns and goes back to David.
My eyes narrow, and I look over at August, too. He’s not paying attention to me. He’s still looking at Charlotte, and I can tell by the look on his face that he knows her. We don’t have time to deal with whatever this is right now, though, so I take the bag of medicines and join her.
After a moment, I hear August sigh, and then he walks up behind me.
“He knows something about medicine,” I say and usher Charlotte out of the way. It takes a bit of a push, but she finally goes and sits at the dinette.
I sit beside August to help, as he slowly moves David’s coat out of the way. While I was gone, Charlotte must have taken off the scraps of shirt because there’s nothing under the coat but angry, torn flesh.
I grimace and August takes a deep breath. There’s still very little bleeding, but the wounds are swollen and leaking something else now. It doesn’t look good, literally and figuratively.
“That’s infected,” I whisper.
“Badly,” August replies with a nod. “I’ve got to clean all of this out, remove any dead tissue. It’s not gonna be pleasant, for any of us.”
I don’t say anything, just start digging through the medical supplies. I find some alcohol, bandages, and antibiotics that expired years ago.
“We’ve got to boil some water, sterilize everything as best as we can,” he says.
I nod and go to see if there are any more clean towels. Then I start the water boiling and find the sharpest, least-used knife I have. It’s not much, just a paring knife.
“Here,” I say and hand it to him.
He scoffs and cocks his head. “I guess it’ll have to do.”
“It’s better than my old hunting knives,” I reply.
He smiles and takes the paring knife from me, and then carefully starts to make incisions in the wounds. Despite David’s semi-conscious state, he can feel the pain and starts to writhe and moan.
“Charlotte, I need your help to hold him down!” I yell back at her. She has her eyes squeezed shut and her hands over her ears, though, so I get up and grab her arm, startling her.
“He’s got to be still,” I say. “You’ve got to help me, or he’ll end up even worse.”
“Don’t you have something for the pain?” she whimpers.
“It won’t help him until we’re done.”
Finally, she wipes her tears and gets up. Then the two of us kneel beside David, her at the end of the sofa, and me beside August. He goes back to work, cutting, cleaning, and disinfecting. When he’s through, I help him apply bandages, and then we toss all the towels out into the snow, along with everything David had been wearing.
“I think you might as well get rid of those clothes,” August says, half serious, half joking. “The bandages will need to be changed at least once a day.”
“What I have isn’t going to last very long,” I say.
“No,” he agrees.
We stand in silence and exhaustion as the sun starts to rise on the frozen horizon. It’s one of the only small moments of beauty that have come out of the apocalypse that now constitutes human existence. Something about the snow and ice crystals that stay in the sky causes the sunrise and sunset to be more spectacular than they ever were before.
Finally, I turn away and clean the blood and pus from my hands in the snow. Then, crouched there, I look up at August.
“You know them,” I say, and it’s not a question.
August looks away, but then finally nods. “I don’t know them, but I know who they are.”
I stand back up and walk over to him. “I’m sensing some animosity.”
“There’s a reason they’re out here on their own,” he says quietly. “They’re town dwellers.”
“I got that impression.”
He nods. “They were banished.”
My eyebrows creep up as I wonder what it takes to get banished these days. “What happened?” I ask.
Suddenly, he snorts and looks over at me. “They basically did the same thing you did last night. Only it was food they stole.”
I stare at him for a moment and then chuckle. “Okay, that’s not fair. I had every intention of paying for that medicine. I just wasn’t going to do it with my body.”
His smile falters, and he nods. “Well, the circumstances were a little different anyway.”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever you did to Fred, it’s…understandable. Those two…” August pauses and looks away again.
“Did they hurt someone?” I ask.
He nods and turns back. “The whole town. They took what they wanted and in their rush not to get caught, destroyed an entire greenhouse worth of food.”