Page 32 of Hunted By Fae

Just dumped out back in an old car lot.

I should be helping.

I should be doing something for them.

But I find I only care about Tess.

So I tend to her, washing her with a warm cloth, spoon-feeding her soup whenever she is lucid enough to swallow, brushing her hair, reading magazine articles to her in her deep, feverish sleep.

Small things.

What else can I do for her?

There is no treatment for this new virus, a poison in the darkness. There is nothing beyond waiting, replenishing her IV fluids, and keeping her as comfortable in her agony as I can.

The fever has plunged her into a sleep for hours, now. No rousing from it. Its grip is too tight.

I swap out the cloth for the bottle of cocoa butter.

Tess always preferred the unscented stuff, not tested on animals, organic and environmentally friendly. Vegan since the day I met her, not once wavered in that, and long before it was a trend.

But options are limited around here, and she’s deep in a fever sleep, so it’s cocoa scented moisturiser I rub along her damp flesh, and she can’t say a thing about it, she can’t question how it was made or tested or ask anything about palm oil.

She’s far too comatose for cognitive function.

Makes it easy for me to coat her in moisturiser, getting her arms and face and neck and legs.

And still, she doesn’t stir.

Beneath her shut eyelids, movement swerves back and forth, up and down, matching the erratic beat of her raspy breaths.

And I just sit here.

Washing her, reading to her.

Pointless. All of it.

It doesn’t do any real good.

Of all the people that have gotten sick, all the beds occupied in the rec centre, only two have gotten back up.

Two.Out of hundreds.

One, I wasn’t here for.

The nurse told me about him when she was trying to comfort me. So it might not even be true. Could just be a kind lie, a thread of hope in darkness.

The other survivor was a woman in her fifties. That did give me some hope before the fever really stole Tesni.

Maybe it’s three plague survivors, if I count Louise, but I’m not so certain it was the black plague that got her… even if she was exposed.

Her sickness was so curt, so fleeting, so nothing.

I watch her now.

That muscle mass she’s built, painstakingly crafted over years of lifting at the gym, is fading. Hunger eats away at us. The rations are slight, and attention to nutrition is out the window.

Not like we’re like monitoring protein intake these days. A thing of the past.