But Tarah and I didn’t even have a room of our own to decorate. I was starting to see the point in Grandma Letty’s argument for private rooms for us now. Did Tarah miss having a tree to decorate with presents underneath it?
I turned to ask her about it but got distracted in the process. Bud, who we’d almost forgotten about in the recliner a few feet away, moaned in his sleep, his head turning to one side then the other.
Nightmares?
I watched him for a few seconds, then looked at Pamela in the kitchen area. “Is it time for another dose?”
“No, he shouldn’t wake up for at least another couple of hours,” she replied with a frown. She dried her hands on a dish towel then took the three steps over to Bud’s chair. “He looks a little flushed.” She touched his forehead and hummed. “He’s running a fever. Let me get my kit.”
She was gone in her family’s bedroom for a few minutes, returning with what looked like an ordinary women’s shoulder bag. From it she took out an electronic thermometer, the kind with a short wand on one end topped by a white plastic ball. She slowly ran it across Bud’s forehead then froze.
I didn’t like her body language. I walked over to see the reading for myself then silently swore. Bud’s temperature was a hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t have to be a doctor to figure out that wasn’t good.
CHAPTER 18
“A problem with the sedatives maybe?” I murmured, my mind racing. This was not a complication we needed right now. We needed to be able to send him home tomorrow with no memories of this place so we could focus on getting our new community through the winter.
“Maybe a reaction to them? He’s been on them off and on all week. Maybe his body’s signaling he’s had enough?” Pamela said.
Sweat beaded on Bud’s forehead and upper lip, trickling down the gullies of his weathered face. He moaned again through lips that looked dry enough to crack soon.
“What should we do?” I asked.
Pamela shook her head. “If his fever was a little lower, I’d say just cover him up, monitor his temp and let the fever break on its own. But a hundred and two is pretty high. We need to cool him off. A lukewarm bath might help, and I’ve got some acetaminophen we can give him. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to try more aggressive methods.”
“Master bath, or the other?” Every house had the same layout with two full baths at either end. The master bathrooms had larger garden tubs.
“Master bath,” she said. “I’ll set up a pallet in the bedroom too. We can keep Bud there for the night so I can monitor him without having to wake everyone else. Plus, it’s flu season. If that’s what this is, things could get messy soon.”
Meaning Bud might start vomiting. Great. And the flu was pretty darn contagious too.
“Maybe Cassie should bunk with Tarah and me in here tonight?” Tarah and I only took up two of the U-shaped couch’s sections, so Cassie could have a whole section to herself.
Pamela nodded, her face grim. “Let’s hope it isn’t the flu, though. If it is, it’ll spread fast and we’ll have a rough few days till I can catch up to it and get everyone healed. Normally the flu only takes me about an hour or two to detox out of a person’s system, but since it’s so contagious and with the housing situation being what it currently is…”
I looked around us, trying to see the situation through Pamela’s point of view. She was right. The central air and heat might not be working, but everyone’s bedroom doors were open to allow the heat from the fireplace to warm them. Making this house one big box of communal germs. If Bud was contagious, every person in this house had already been exposed.
“I’ll tell everyone to stay in the house away from the others tonight just in case,” I said. “At least that will contain it to just this house. We’ll know more tomorrow whether he’s contagious, right?”
She nodded.
“Alright. If he is, we’ll do an official quarantine then.”
“Sounds good.” Pamela bent down and lifted Bud’s arm as if she planned to haul him off to the bathtub herself.
“Mike and I’ve got this.” I took Bud’s arm from her then called out for Mike. He hopped up from the living room floor by the coffee table to join us. “Bud’s sick,” I explained. “We need to get him into the master tub to cool him down.”
Mike grabbed Bud’s other arm, and between the two of us, we managed to haul the unconscious man up out of the chair, through the kitchen, through the master bedroom past two metal frame bunk beds and a startled Steve who was reading in bed, and into the master bath. We set Bud on the linoleum covered steps that edged the garden tub. Mike held him upright while I got Bud shucked down to his underwear. Pamela brought a few buckets of room temperature water plus one pot of warmed water to fill the tub a few inches. Once she gave the go-ahead, Mike and I managed to lift Bud over the lip of the tub and into the lukewarm water.
I tried not to think about how similar this was to arranging that dead cop’s body behind the steering wheel of his car.
As soon as he was in the water, Bud began to shake. And yet he still didn’t open his eyes.
“What the heck are you doing?” Steve asked from the doorway behind us.
“The bus driver’s sick,” Pamela said. “We’ve got to get his fever down. He’ll be sleeping in our room tonight.” She wasn’t asking his permission and clearly didn’t care about her husband’s opinion on the subject.
I kept my back turned toward Steve to hide my grin. Pamela was a lot stronger than her tiny frame looked.
“What about Cassie? I don’t want her to get—” Steve began.
“She’ll be sleeping in the living room tonight,” Pamela said, leaning over to dip a washcloth in the water so she could cool off Bud’s face and neck.
“I want her out of this house. Now,” Steve said.
“There’s no telling how long this man has been running a fever,” Pamela said. “If he’s contagious, she’s already been exposed, along with you and me and everyone else in this house. We need to try and keep this contained if we can. We don’t even know what it is yet.”
Steve cursed loudly. “I told you this might happen. If Cassie gets sick—”