Gray (Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

was. And she was as close to a doctor as Benjamin would likely ever find.
    Fishing was done for the day. One fish had snatched at a lure while she devised her debriding syringe. She couldn’t claim to have caught it, exactly—it caught itself. But still, it was enough for one person’s food for one day. They had a couple extra fillets from the last two days, and some heads and bones, so they’d be okay for the next two meals.
    Back at the campsite, she pulled out her makeshift pot, the doubled aluminum cake pans stolen from the cultists, now with a pair of heat-hardened willow branch handles woven through the top inch of the sides. She gathered the charcoal and kindling—all the broken reeds and branches—and lit it with her magnesium fire-starter. While she waited for water to boil, she took what water bottles they had and filled them from her fishing hole. It was almost clear water, now that the ash had fallen to the lake bottom and the ice protected the water from accumulating more every day.
    When the water was at a healthy boil, she shook the pan, getting boiling water into every corner. She took out the last shirt Benjamin had worn and the bandages she’d made from one of the dead cultist’s torn shirts and poured the water over them. She filled the pan again, and when the cloth had cooled so that she could barely stand to touch it with her bare hands, wrung the hot water from the shirt and bandage. Soap would be so much better to clean them and her hands, but boiling water, poured over them a few times, would have to do.
    Benjamin returned a couple hours before dusk. The bandages she had dried out near the fire, on rocks she had sterilized with more boiling water. When she saw him, she nudged the water closer to the smoldering fire.
    “Operation time, huh?” he said, dumping the bag of the charcoal he’d collected that day.
    “Sorry.”
    “I trust you.”
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “Shirt off, huh?”
    “Not until I’ve boiled and cooled this water. Don’t want you freezing to death before I can—” She’d almost said “kill you myself,” but realized just in time this was not the time to make jokes. “Get ready,” she finished. While the water cooled, he paced along the lake’s edge. When she was ready for him, she called him over.
    “Let’s get it done, then,” he said.
    “You must have a good immune system,” she said, looking at the wound again. “It’s worse every day, but it could have gone bad much faster.”
    “I guess I get sick less often than most. I thought it was because I was a hermit and wasn’t catching germs from anyone else.”
    She lined up her equipment. “Yeah, we people are filthy creatures.” She wished for a nurse, to talk and distract him. But she was all there was. “Tell me something while I do this.”
    “What?” he said.
    “Anything. A happy memory from childhood. A story. About your favorite motorbike.” She dipped up some water and washed her hands again. It was body temp. “Go on, talk.”
    “I remember the first time I rode on a motorcycle.”
    “Tell me that.” She prodded at his wound with a knife blade, as sterile as she could make it under the circumstances. She scraped off the scab that had formed over the exit wound.
    His breath caught, and thin blood trickled from the hole. The wound looked like a little flat volcano, with the skin at the edges raised, and the center part a bloody, pulpy crater. She tuned out his words and focused on the job at hand. Loading her syringe carefully, she brought it to the wound and pressed the plunger.
    The stream that came out was thin and not as forceful as she’d hoped. She’d have to be less delicate when she pressed the plunger—but that would tear up the device sooner. Well, screw it. She could build another tomorrow if she failed today.
    She loaded the syringe again, heard Benjamin say, “But I didn’t really have a good grasp on left and right yet,” and she tuned him back out. She held