There, DeWitt fed Augustine a little canned soup, gave him some water. He said he was feeling better and went back out with the rested first team.
All through the morning and afternoon, their labors were watched by rows of stone-faced National Guard troops patrolling beyond the razor wire perimeter fences.
At two in the afternoon, Augustine was compelled once again to go up to the office and lie down. Dicken emerged from the research lab with another bag full of specimen kits and met him there.
Four children who had worked with the teams slept in the corner, arms around each other, snoring lightly.
Dicken looked down on his former boss. Augustine was trembling, but his face had lost that distant, defeated look.
“You are a surprising fellow, Mark,” Dicken admitted.
“Not really,” Augustine croaked. He touched his throat. “Sorry. My voice is shot. How’s the lab work going?”
“Your turn,” Dicken said, and bent down to draw blood. When he was finished, he had Augustine scrape a plastic depressor on his tongue, and sealed that into a little plastic bag.
“Anything conclusive?” Augustine asked.
“Still getting specimens from the staff.”
“What next?”
“I’m going out into the field with Toby. Carry on while you rest. Can’t let an old bastard like you act the humanitarian all by your lonesome.”
Augustine nodded. “Conversion of Saul. Go forth,” he advised piously, and crossed the air between them.
Dicken stretched. His whole body felt stiff.
Augustine rolled on his side. “I’m not doing this out of pure charity, I confess,” he murmured. Dicken bent over to hear the soft words. “I have done a nasty thing, Christopher. I have played a card I vowed I would never play, to give my enemies—our enemies—the rope I need to hang them all.”
“What card?” Dicken said.
“I’m still a bastard. But I do begin to understand them, Christopher.”
“The children?”
“All our sweet little albatrosses.”
“Good for you,” Dicken said, his neck hair prickling, and turned to leave.
48
PENNSYLVANIA
The sun was high in the sky when Kaye raised her head. She might have slept for another hour or two; she did not remember.
She rolled over on the dock.
It’s gone, she said. It was a dream. Or worse.
She stood and brushed off her jeans, prepared to feel a resigned sadness. I should get a checkup. There’s been so much stress… Her nose and forehead still felt stuffy. Was that a symptom of embolism or a burst aneurysm? Had wires crossed in her head, pouring signals from one side of the brain to the other? A short circuit?
She turned to look back along the dock at the house, took a step…
And let out a squeak like a surprised mouse. She stretched out her arms.
The presence was still with her. Quiet, calm, other; patient and real. At the same time Kaye was relieved and terrified.
She ran to the cabin. Mitch knelt on the floor beside Stella. He looked up as she came through the porch door. His hair was tousled and his face looked like a rumpled rag.
“Her fever’s gone, I think,” Mitch said, searching Kaye’s features. His brows twitched. “The spots are smaller. The spots on her butt are gone.”
Stella rolled over. Her cheeks had regained more of their color. The sleeping bag was gone, and in its place Mitch had laid out an air mattress covered with a bright yellow sheet and a lime green blanket.
Kaye stared at them both. Her hands hung by her sides, her shoulders slumped.
“Are you all right?” Mitch asked.
Stella rubbed her eyes and reached out to Kaye. Their fingers touched and Kaye moved in and gripped her hand.
“You smell different,” Stella said.
Kaye bent down and hugged her daughter as fiercely as she dared.
“She’s asleep again.” Mitch rejoined Kaye in the cabin’s small, neat kitchen. “She looks better, doesn’t she?”
“Yes. Much.” Kaye bit the inside of her lip and glanced at her husband. “The Mackenzies laid in a wide selection of teas,” she said. She opened the box of teabags, confused, desperate.
Mitch returned her look, patient but tired. “Does she need more medicine?”
“Her neck doesn’t hurt. Her head doesn’t hurt. She’s not feverish. I removed the needle because she drank some orange juice. I don’t think she’ll need any more antiviral.”
“She wet the sleeping bag.”
“I know. Thank you for changing it.”
“You were on the dock. You were asleep.”
Kaye looked out the kitchen window at the dock, now bright in the full sun. “You should have awakened me.”
“You looked peaceful. I’m sorry if I said anything strange last night.”
“You?” She laughed and fumbled the box of tea bags, picked up the spilled ones, then took down two mugs from a rack over the kitchen window. One mug said Kiss a Clown, You Know You Want to. The other was from Smith College, gold emblem of a gate on dark blue. “Not at all,” Kaye murmured, and filled a kettle with water. Somewhere, a pump started chuckling, and the water jerked from the tap, finally flowing in a steady stream. She swished her hand back and forth, fingers spreading through the coldness.
Not at all the same.
“How are we, Kaye?” Mitch asked, standing beside her at the sink.
“Stella is going to be fine,” Kaye said before she could think.
“How are we, Kaye?”
Kaye reached out and gripped Mitch’s hand on the counter. She had not spent much time lately simply touching her husband. He had been gone so much, and so often, of course.
She must have looked miserable and lost. But what she felt was very, very physical.
Mitch pulled her close. He was always the one to make the first move; except that she had made the move that had produced Stella. Mitch had held back, worried about Kaye, or perhaps just scared at the thought of being a parent to a new kind of human being. They had been so in love, and the problem was, Kaye could not answer Mitch’s question now, not truthfully, because she did not know.
There was still love. What kind of love? “We are going to be better,” she said into his shoulder. “There is certainly better to be.”
“They shouldn’t hound us,” he said with the boyish sternness of the night before.
“I don’t think we have any control over that.”
“We won’t stay here long,” he said, and glared out the window at the woods, the dock, the sunshine. “This place is too nice. I don’t trust it.”
“It is nice. Why not stay a while? The Mackenzies would never tell anyone.”
Mitch brushed her cheek with his palm. “Their son is in a camp. The children in the camps are getting sick.”
Kaye drew her eyebrows together. She could not follow this line of reasoning.
“Mark Augustine has been looking for you, for us. He’s been waiting for the right moment to reel us in. The illness is scaring people badly. This is his moment.”
Kaye squeezed his forearm hard, as if to punish him.
“Ow,” he said.
She loosened her grip. “We need to keep Stella quiet and calm. She needs to rest for a few days at least. She can’t rest in a bouncing Jeep.”
“All right,” Mitch said.
“We’ll stay here,” Kaye said. “Will it be okay?”
“It’ll have to be,” Mitch said.
Kaye leaned her head against Mitch’s chest. Her eyes lost focus and then closed. “Is she still asleep?” she asked.