Chapter 7: First Freeze
By morning the thermometer under Claire's tongue said a hundred and two point six, and Leon read it twice against the lantern the way she had once read his.
"My legs," she said. Her voice was thick. "Somebody beat my legs with a bat while I was asleep. Was it you?"
"Wasn't me."
"Calves. Both of them." She pushed the blankets down and pulled them up again, shaking. "And my head. And I'm so cold, Leon, why is it so cold?"
"Because it's thirty-eight degrees in here and you're a hundred and two."
He laid out everything they had on the floor beside the mattress, the way she'd done for him: sixty capsules of cephalexin, the two bottles of cefaclor, the brown bottle of doxycycline she'd swept off the shelf on Warren Street because she hadn't known which one was right and wasn't coming back. He read every label. Then he went through the yellow binder, page by page, past the radiation tables and the plumbing, until he reached a section in the back headed SANITATION AND DISEASE CONTROL AFTER ATTACK.
The binder had been written for people who'd be living in basements with flooded drains and rats, and so it had a paragraph on what they'd catch. Water-borne fever (Weil's disease). Spread by rat-fouled water. Sudden fever and chills. Severe headache. Severe pain in the muscles, especially the calves. Reddening of the eyes. Onset two days to three weeks after exposure. Treat with penicillin or tetracycline under a physician's direction.
He read it three times. Then he looked at Claire, curled under the blankets with her red eyes shut, who had gone under in the cistern eight days ago and come up spitting.
There was no tetracycline in the pile. There was doxycycline, and folded inside the doxycycline bottle was a paper insert in print so small he had to hold it an inch from the lantern. Its first line said a broad-spectrum antibiotic of the tetracycline class.
"Claire." He shook her gently. "I need you to swallow something."
"Is it a fish?"
"It's a pill."
"I'm not eating dog food, Leon, I don't care what you say."
He got the capsule into her with a mouthful of iodine water and a lemon candy to chase it, and wrote it on the pad in his own bad handwriting, because she was in no state to hold the pen.
C: 102.6. Doxy #1, 7 a.m. 100 mg, 2/day. Binder says Weil's dz (rat water). Calves, eyes, chills = yes.
At six the next morning the woman on State simplex said the freeze had come a night early. Eighteen degrees on the ridge. Leon keyed twice and went back to work.
By noon he had built a room inside the room. Three steel shelving units from the evidence cage, dragged clanging across the vault floor and stood around the mattresses on three sides, the brick wall on the fourth. Over them, the canvas tarps from the garage, the spare blankets, the plastic sheeting off the evidence cage's shelves, clipped and tied and taped until there was a low dim tent around the bed no bigger than the inside of a station wagon. The space heater went in at the foot. The air in there was about a sixtieth of the vault's, by his reckoning. A sixtieth of the vault took a lot less heating.
Heater: 2 on, 2 off. Dark hours only (exhaust).
He ran it the first night, two on and two off, and inside the tent it reached fifty. Claire slept through most of it, shivering in her sleep even so.
Claire was riding the bike up Arklay Road in the dusk, and the engine was warm between her knees, and somebody was reading to her.
"...the survey meter should be handled with care and stored in a dry place..."
She was on the train. Sherry had her hand flat on the glass. No, Claire had her hand on the glass, and Sherry was outside it on the platform, and the doors were closing on a timer, and that was wrong, that was the wrong way round.
"...each occupant should be allowed not less than one quart of water per day..."
Leon's voice. Leon reading the Civil Defense cards out loud, as if they were a bedtime story. She tried to tell him he'd got the water allowance wrong, it was a gallon between them, she'd done the math, and the math slid off the page and lay on the floor in pieces.
Chris was sitting at the end of the mattress eating a protein bar. They taste like candy, he said. They don't, she told him. He'd left in August. He'd said he would call.
"Chris."
"It's Leon." A cool cloth on her forehead. "It's me. Chris isn't here."
"He left a card. Card for C. I've got it in my pocket."
"I know. I've got it. It's safe."
Hot, and then cold, and then so cold she couldn't breathe for her teeth chattering, and his arms round her through the blankets, his chin on her head, and the orange glow of the heater through her eyelids. She counted things. Crackers, tins, gallons. She counted his heartbeats against her back and lost count at forty and started again.
Later, in the dark, the heater off and the tent going cold, she heard him talking.
Low. Not to her. The careful voice he used on the radio. She heard her and alone and not before then, and the other voice answering, mild and pleased, and she thought: I'm dreaming Mr. Manners now. Wonderful. She tried to say something about it and fell asleep before the words got out.
On the twenty-second day, at four in the afternoon, the thermometer said a hundred and four point one.
Leon sat with it in his hand for a full minute. Then he went and turned the generator on.
It was daylight. On the ridge they'd see the exhaust from the stack, a white plume in the cold air above the ruins. He knew it, and he ran the heater anyway, for six hours straight, because inside the tent it was thirty-nine degrees and she was burning and shaking at the same time and didn't know who he was.
That had been at two o'clock. She'd opened her eyes and looked at him and said, politely, "Who are you?" and he had said his name, and she'd frowned as if it were in a foreign language, and gone back to sleep. It was the worst thing that had happened to him since the platform. It was worse than the platform.
He kept a cold cloth on her forehead and wrists. He got water into her, a spoonful at a time, with candy dissolved in it for the sugar. He gave her the fifth and sixth capsules on time. He went down the service passage alone twice for water, stepping over his own line of cans in the dark with the shotgun's two shells and his heart going like a drum, and came back both times and found her the same.
At midnight the radio spoke.
"Your chimney's been smoking all afternoon, Officer." The voice was gentle, almost sympathetic. "On a cold day, from up here, it's very easy to see. Somebody's cold." A pause. "Or somebody's sick."
Leon sat on the edge of the mattress with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
"I have a physician," Manners said. "I can have one at your door very quickly. You know that."
He looked at Claire. She was asleep, finally, breathing fast and shallow. Her hair was dark with sweat. Her hand lay open on the blanket, palm up, the old cut from the fourth day still a pink line across it.
He thought about the doxycycline, three days in. He thought about the binder: under a physician's direction. He thought about Marvin behind the door, and Ada's hand, and how every time he'd ever done the math on somebody, he had come out one short.
He picked up the mic.
"You want a witness," he said. "You get the one with the badge. That's me. She gets your doctor and medicine, and you leave her here, and you leave her alone. Forever. She's a college kid. Nobody's going to believe a college kid."
"Done," Manners said, so quickly that some part of Leon flinched. "Tomorrow."
"No. When she can walk. Not before." He was buying time, and he knew it, and he didn't know what for. "The thirtieth."
A pause. "The thirtieth. Noon. Come up to the roof alone, Officer, and the physician will go down to her. I'm a patient man. Eight days is nothing."
The hiss came back.
Leon put the mic down and sat in the cold and didn't write anything on the pad.
At three in the morning her fever broke. He woke with his arm across her and the blanket soaked, and her skin cool and clammy under his hand, and she was mumbling about crackers. By morning it was ninety-nine point eight. She drank a whole cup of water on her own and looked at him with clear eyes, still bloodshot but hers, and said, "You look terrible."
He put his face in the blanket beside her and didn't lift it for a while.
By the twenty-fifth day Claire could sit up for an hour at a time, and she spent it on the pad.
She had to. Leon's entries over the last five days were a disaster: crammed in the margins, arrows going nowhere, heater 2/2 and C ate 1/2 cracker!! and a temperature, 104.1, that he'd circled so hard the pen went through the paper. She copied it all onto a clean page in order, which was how she found out what he'd been doing while she was gone. Two trips a day to the cistern, alone. The generator in daylight. Fourteen gallons pulled down the siphon into the day tank in one night.
DIESEL. Main tank ~245. Doxy: 3 left in course, 39 in bottle.
She kept coming back to the dream. Her. Alone. Not before then.
At midnight she was awake. She'd been awake for an hour, lying in the tent with her eyes open, and she knew Leon knew it.
"Five days, Officer," said Mr. Manners. "I hope Miss Redfield is feeling better. My physician is looking forward to meeting her."
Then the hiss.
She didn't move. Beside her, Leon had gone completely still, the way he did when something with claws was in the room.
"I wasn't dreaming," she said.
"Claire."
"I heard you. I thought I was dreaming him." She sat up. Her legs still ached and she didn't care. "What did you give him?"
He told her. He didn't try to soften it, which was the only thing that kept her from hitting him.
"You traded yourself," she said. "For me. Without asking me."
"You didn't know my name."
"I had a fever."
"You had a hundred and four and you asked me who I was." His voice cracked across the middle. "You think I wanted to? I sat here for two days watching you not know me, and the only thing I had was a paragraph in a book from 1962, and he had a doctor."
"He had a man who throws grenades through windows before he looks inside." She was on her knees now, facing him in the dim tent, close enough to see the gray at his temples where the ash had never quite washed out. "You know what he is. You watched it. And you were going to walk up to that roof on the thirtieth and let him have you so I could lie down here and be safe? Alone? For how long? Until the crackers ran out?"
"Until spring. Until somebody—"
"Nobody's coming, Leon. You told me that the first day." Her eyes were stinging. "I stood right there and told you I wasn't going on your pile. And you went and put yourself on it instead, and you didn't even tell me. You did my math for me. You decided what I'm worth and you didn't let me vote."
"You'd have done it," he said quietly. "If it was me."
That stopped her, because it was true. She'd stepped off a train for him.
"Yes," she said. "And you'd be exactly this angry."
She got up, pushed through the blankets, and went out into the vault.
It was thirty-four degrees out there. She sat on the floor by the drums in the dark with her arms round her knees and the cold coming through her jeans, and let herself cry, quietly and furiously, until she was done. Then she just sat. Behind her the tent glowed faintly from the lantern, and he didn't come after her, and she was grateful, and she was angry that she was grateful.
She lasted an hour. Then her teeth started going, and her legs ached, and the thing about thirty-four degrees was that it didn't care how angry you were.
She went back in. He was sitting exactly where she'd left him.
"This isn't forgiving you," she said, getting under the blankets. "This is thermodynamics."
"Okay."
She lay with her back to him. After a while he said, very low, "I'm sorry. I counted wrong."
"You did."
"I don't know how to do it the other way. Count myself in."
"I know you don't." She turned over. His face was wet. She hadn't seen that before, not even under the counter. "So we make a rule. Nobody decides alone. Not the big things. Not even when the other one's out of their head. You wait, or you wake me, or you write it on the pad, and I get a vote."
"Nobody decides alone," he said.
She put her hand on his chest. Under it his heart was going hard. She thought about the thirtieth, and a helicopter coming down onto a roof for a man who'd be standing there by himself, and a polite voice that was certain it had won.
"He thinks you're coming up alone," she said slowly.
"I'm not going up at all."
"No. But he thinks you are." She looked at him in the dark. "We know exactly where he's going to be, and when, and what he wants. He's never once told us that before."
Leon was quiet for a long time. Then he laughed, a small wrecked sound, and pulled her in, and kissed her as if he'd thought he'd lost the right to. She kissed him back. Her hands found the hem of his shirt, and his found her face, and somewhere in there she reached over without looking and turned the lantern out.
At six on the twenty-seventh day State simplex woke up, and it wasn't the woman.
"Kennedy. It's Walt."
Leon had the mic in his hand before he knew he'd moved. Claire sat up beside him in the blankets.
Hollis's voice was rougher than he remembered, and lower, a man talking into a radio with his hand cupped round it. "Don't say anything you'd mind him hearing. He listens to this channel. But you can talk to me."
"What did she ask for," Leon said, "after the pound cake?"
A dry sound that might have been a laugh. "Another one. And nobody gave it to her, and she gave me a look like I'd shot her dog." A breath. "That good enough?"
Claire had her hand over her mouth. Leon found he couldn't speak for a second. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, Sergeant. That's good enough."
"They sent me back up yesterday. Checkpoint Nine, the south road. The jackets want every man on the line who can tell a helicopter from a hawk, because something flew inside their line on the ninth without anybody's say-so, and they'd very much like to know whose it was." Hollis paused. "So would I, except I already know. So listen. The man on Four isn't one of mine and he isn't one of theirs. He came up with the cleanup contractors. The company that owned what was under your city."
Claire said, so quietly only Leon heard it, "Umbrella."
"And here's the part that matters," Hollis said. "The jackets don't know he's been talking to you. Rita's been sitting up at midnight with a tape recorder. I know about the thirtieth, son. I know what you said to him." He let that sit. "I think I know how you can bury him. But you're going to have to be loud."