Her lips pressed tight together as she took a deep breath in through her nose, then let it out. “Actually, I'm not sure I was ever planning on leaving here. This place isn’t something that will happen overnight. It may take decades for this village to grow into what it can become, and somebody's got to be here to chronicle it every step of the way so others can follow in our footsteps and start their own havens. You and I both know what it has the potential to be. You described it yourself when we first got here, so don’t lie to me and say you can’t see it too.”
I didn’t answer her because she was right. If these people could survive the disease and the rest of the winter months, this village could be amazing. But the odds were just too high against that ever happening now.
“But it means living the rest of your life here, Tarah. With no internet, no mall, no going to college. What if you can never see your brother or your parents again? Is it really worth devoting your whole life to?”
Her chin rose another inch. “I can’t imagine a more worthy cause.”
And that’s when I knew...I was never going to convince her to leave. This place had become some kind of Holy Grail crusade for her. And even if I dragged her away from this place, the minute she got free she would come running right back.
CHAPTER 22
Monday, December 28th
We didn’t speak to each other for the next few days. Not even after glaring at each other from opposite sides of the village’s first grave as the makeshift coffin was lowered into its cold resting place in the harder than cement earth. The entire settlement, at least the ones who weren’t sick yet, had argued for hours about whether they should burn the body. I’d told them to bury it; everyone was already exposed to the virus, and burning the body would only send up a huge smoke cloud that would forced the already exhausted Mike to do a spell to hide it. It was already a full time job for witches with wind control abilities to keep a breeze blowing over our chimneys strong enough to disperse our small fireplaces’ smoke.
But I hadn’t stuck around for their final vote. I’d only known what everyone had decided to do with the body when two guys had shown up to borrow some power tools to make the coffin with.
No one had said much at the funeral. Probably too afraid or in shock.
I watched Tarah watching me across that hole that had taken several men hours and a lot of spells to chip out, and I wondered what she was thinking. Did she understand that this was only the first of who knew how many deaths to come? Did she care that helping the healers in the infirmary every day only increased her chances of being buried somewhere near this gravesite?
How many graves would it take to convince her to leave?
I wanted to say all of these things to Tarah. But I didn’t. What would be the point? If looking right at the evidence of how dangerous this situation was didn’t scare or convince her, nothing I could say would either.
Thursday, December 31st
In the days after the funeral, we kept to our corners, she at the infirmary, me at the tiny house, which was finally starting to look like a real house. I’d bought LED lanterns so I could work in the dark and gotten the roof on and the exterior siding up. But with every day that passed, I became more aware of how my time was running out to find one last way to protect her. I had no idea how long I had before Tarah’s immune system failed us both. How long could she go on risking the odds with constant, daily exposure to the virus before she was exposed one too many times, breathed in one too many breaths of infected air, handled one too many germ-infected washcloths?
I limited myself to a single meal a day, my dinners dropped off by Tarah in silence and received with only a brief thanks from me. She never stayed to talk or help with the house anymore, leaving me to eat alone in the cold. And yet, every night, whether she realized it or not, her hand continued to slip over and hold mine when I finally gave in to exhaustion and crashed on the couch near her.
That one bit of daily contact with her was enough to keep me hoping that somehow we’d make it through this together.
I took to reading the kit’s instruction manual while I ate, counting the steps left to be completed like a general plotting his next battle strategies for his army. Except there was no army helping me out. Everyone who wasn’t at the infirmary had banded together to use various spells to laboriously chip out holes for septic system tanks and field lines in the hopes that a proper indoor water system would improve the general hygiene and wipe out the disease. Which left me on my own with my limited tools and even more limited knowledge and time.
As the final days of December passed, I grew ever more desperate. I skipped steps, reasoning that I couldn’t glue down the shower stall or flooring in the rest of the house due to the cold preventing the adhesives from holding and drying properly. I couldn’t glue together the plumbing either for the same reason. So I just set everything in place for now.
I built the porch and loft spaces, put in windows and doors, stuffed in rolls of insulation everywhere. It was while I was running the wiring on New Year’s Eve that I heard the shouting.
I opened my house’s new front door, stood on my newly created porch at the end of the trailer furthest from the hitch, and looked outside. It was Steve and Pamela again. Turning around, I went back inside, shut the door and found myself silently wishing Steve good luck with his arguments. I sure as heck couldn’t begrudge the guy for trying to do the exact same thing I wished I could do and get the woman I loved out of here to safety. Maybe I’d even put the spark plug back into the bus for him. The only reason I hadn’t used the bus myself as a temporary home for Tarah and me was because running its engine to keep it warm enough would quickly use up its fuel tanks, and I was pretty sure the gas stations in town would notice if I kept bringing in the same bus to refuel.
Though I tried to ignore their argument, I still couldn’t help but sneak a peek out through the living room window at Pamela. Maybe she and the other healers were finally making some progress in fighting the virus, and she had reason to want to stay?
The slump of her shoulders and dark circles beneath her eyes, visible even from a distance, killed that brief bit of hope.
How could Tarah expect me to be hopeful when even the healers looked defeated and ready to give up?
That evening, I had just squatted down in the living room area, getting ready to tackle the wood burning stove’s installation, when someone knocked on my door.