Pamela rubbed her forehead, her movements slow and weary. “I guess so. But what about you? Even if no one knows you led the prison break in Texas, they still might recognize you because of who your dad is. What if he’s searching for you?”
“Grandma Letty would have warned me if he was.” No doubt dear old Dad was trying to keep my disappearance quiet to avoid the media coverage and what the reporters might dig up about our family.
“They’ll want ID for Bud,” Pamela said.
I searched for Bud’s clothes, finding them in a pile in the bathroom. His wallet was still in his jeans’ back pocket.
Steve helped me get Bud dressed and haul him out to my truck. Pamela followed with a blanket.
I stashed the miniature Christmas tree and Tarah’s presents on the backseat so we could set Bud in the front. It would be too hard for me to get him out of the backseat later by myself. But I should be able to roll him out from the front seat.
“Let Tarah know where I’m headed?” I asked Pamela. In the rush to get Bud ready for transport, I hadn’t seen Tarah. She must have been in one of the back bedrooms helping the other healers.
Pamela nodded as she started to close the passenger side door.
Steve’s hand shot out to stop her. “Wait. What if he tells someone about this place?”
Pamela looked at the elderly man for a long minute then shook her head. “He probably doesn’t have enough time to tell anyone anything. And even if he did, they would just think he was delirious from the fever.”
After another hesitation, Steve let her shut the door and I started the engine.
I drove into town as fast as I could on the icy, dark roads, using the paper map of Spearfish the logging team had used to find the village site in the first place.
At the hospital’s ER entrance, I parked, then ran around to the passenger side and opened the door.
Bud was awake.
“Uh, hi. Remember me?” I said, unsure what the heck I should say to him.
He frowned and mumbled, “Where are we?”
“Hospital. You’re sick. But we’re going to get you some really good help.” I slung his right arm over my shoulder and pulled him out of the truck and onto his feet.
He tried to walk, but I still had to carry most of his weight into the ER. Once inside, a nurse saw us and brought a wheelchair to take Bud off in. Another nurse handed me a clipboard and asked me to fill it out in the waiting area, but I didn’t know any of the answers she wanted. I explained that he was just our bus driver, not a relative. Immediately her face became closed off, and I knew she was going to tell me that I was no longer allowed to know anything that was going on.
“Look, I know you’re supposed to kick me out since I’m not his family. But there’s another kid who’s sick on our bus, and I need to know what Bud’s got in case the kid has it too.”
“You should bring the—”
“The mother won’t let me. She’s from another country and suspicious of our doctors here.” I faked a smile that hopefully said “I know, crazy, right?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “I’ll let the doctor know. If the patient gives her permission, then she’ll be able to tell you the diagnosis.”
“Thanks.” I found a chair in the waiting room and sank down into it. Opposite me, my normal reflection stared back from the window’s undivided glass pane.
Minutes passed, then hours. I watched the Late Night show on a TV mounted high in the corner with the sound turned off, closed captioning filling me in on what I wasn’t allowed to hear. Then the news came on. The world seemed like one big endless war zone out there, the news filled with so much civil war and anti-Clann rioting that they didn’t have time enough to cover it all, much less anything else.
After awhile, I couldn’t watch it anymore. I tried to see the mountains in the distance through the window, but it was too dark outside. All I could see was my reflection staring back at me.
My hair was getting too long again. Mom would be nagging me to get a hair cut if she could see me now. I’d managed to at least shave this morning, but I looked scruffy again. It had been a long day.
And it just kept getting longer.
“Sir?” A sharp female voice jerked me out of my thoughts.
I stood up and turned toward the voice. A short brunette in scrubs and a long white coat stood waiting for me at the swinging double doors.
“You came in with Bud Preston?” she asked.
I nodded.
“He’s asked to see you and given me permission to discuss his condition with you as well.”
I tried to hide my surprise on both counts as we headed down a corridor that could have come straight out of a movie, except the paintings and photographs on the taupe walls here were mostly of the Black Hills mountains.
She stopped outside a room. The door was shut, and she made no move to open it yet.
She hugged her plastic clipboard to her chest, oddly reminding me of Tarah back in school, though she had to be in her thirties or forties.
“To be honest,” she began. “We don’t know what’s wrong with Mr. Preston. We’ve managed to stabilize him for now, and of course we’re still running tests, so we may know more in a few days. But as ill as Mr. Preston is, I would really like to send him to a larger hospital. Unfortunately, he refuses to let me transfer him out of here without speaking to you first.”
“Are you saying he could die?”
“Of course we’re doing everything we can to prevent that. But if we can’t figure out how to treat him and he continues to refuse to be transferred to another hospital, then yes, that is a possibility.”
Bud could die from whatever this was. Which meant everyone else in the village could too. I swallowed hard. “Is it something...exotic, or abnormal or something?”
“It appears to be the flu. At least, he has every symptom of your garden variety, everyday type of flu. But we can’t seem to catch any of it in his blood work in order to verify that. We’ve notified the CDC who are sending someone to examine him in case this is something new we’re dealing with. Now you said—”
I didn’t need to hear anything more. All she was saying was exactly what Pamela and the other village healers had said, with one difference...the virus was possibly lethal and could kill its victims in a matter of days. Which meant I had no time.
And yet there was one more thing I needed to do before I left here. “You said he asked to see me?”