Page 45 of A Wilderness Within

“I wish I knew more about babies,” she confessed to Lincoln. He was unloading their emergency packs and heading for the door. He glanced over his shoulder at her, a sweet, amused smile on his lips.

“You’ll figure it out,” he promised. “If not, I’ll find a bookstore and get you some baby books.”

She huffed and picked the carrier up from the back seat and followed him.

“You meanwe’llfigure it out. You’re part of this now, Lincoln. Ellie, Kirby, and I, we are your new unit.” She was teasing him, but when she caught up to him at the front door, she saw he was taking this seriously.

“You’re right. You are.” Then he focused on the door, using an iron Halligan bar he’d found in an abandoned fire truck earlier that week. It had a forked end to bust doors open.

He was a true soldier, a man of few words, but when he did speak it always had meaning. Sometimes she missed the idle conversations, but other times she didn’t mind the silence, not when he was with her.

The door opened, and Lincoln entered first, gun at the ready, but Caroline doubted anyone was alive inside. There were few cars around, and where there were few cars there were usually fewer bodies and likely no survivors. Once Lincoln cleared the house, he left her and Ellie so he could unpack the chickens from the car. Kirby followed him out, a little too curious about the live fowl.

“Come on, Ellie,” she said as she took the baby carrier down the hall and found a bedroom.

She pulled the baby out of the carrier and laid down a changing pad on the bed and checked the diaper situation. As she’d suspected, fully loaded. She did her best to clean the baby off and put a new diaper on her. Caroline fixed the little onesie back up and tucked her back in her carrier. Lincoln had found a travel crib in her parents’ house that they would be able to leave Ellie in tonight.

Caroline stroked a fingertip down Ellie’s cheek, her heart breaking all over again as she watched Ellie’s bright blue eyes fix on her. When would she realize her mom and dad weren’t ever coming back? Caroline knew that babies recognized the faces of their parents. Would she recognize the fact that she would never see them again?

“I know I’m not your mom and Lincoln is not your dad, but you’re ours now, and we will love you just as much as your parents did, okay?” She wiped a tear from her nose and let Ellie grasp her finger tight. The baby made breathless little grunts and exhalations as she tried to communicate to Caroline in return.

“Should we go see what the boys are up to?” She scooped Ellie up, feeling oddly comforted knowing that her talking was welcomed by the baby. They wandered through the house toward the den and found Lincoln setting up lanterns and drawing curtains closed.

He nodded at the baby in her arms. “Is she hungry?”

“Probably.” Caroline looked at the baby, who was watching Lincoln with rounded eyes.

“I’ll get a fire going in the fireplace. It’s too dark for anyone to see smoke. We can warm some water and formula in a pot.”

“Okay.” She set the baby down on the floor on top of a thick soft blanket, then retrieved Lincoln’s satellite radio.

“Can I use this?”

“Sure. What are you wanting to do?” He knelt by the fireplace, arranging logs before he used a paper towel from the kitchen as kindling to get the flames going.

“We need survivors to come to Atlanta, don’t we?”

“We do. The CDC will want as many blood samples as they can to figure out what we all have in common.”

“I want to find people. I want to remind them that we are all in this together. Anyone who has a radio might hear me. I’ll try a different channel each night.”

Lincoln stared at her for a long moment. “Don’t tell anyone where we are, not specifically. Not until we’re in a more secure situation. You could paint a target on our backs.”

“I won’t,” she said, clutching the radio to her chest before she went to the kitchen to retrieve the formula from Ellie’s emergency pack.

Lincoln did a good enough job of warming formula and water over the fireplace and then filled the baby bottle after testing the formula on his skin. He stared at her when he caught her watching him, a smile on her face.

“What?”

She chuckled. “How do you know what to do?” She didn’t have the faintest clue about taking care of a baby. Whatever other women said, this didn’t come naturally, at least not to her. She felt protective, overprotective even, but she didn’t have any instincts about what to do, when to feed her, when to check her diapers.

“Haven’t you seenThree Men and a Baby?” He smirked. “You can learn a lot about babies from TV.”

“I forgot about that one.” That had been one of her mother’s favorites. Three bachelor friends had found an abandoned baby on their doorstep, and they took turns raising it until the mother came back to claim the child. It was a sweet movie and, as Lincoln pointed out, reasonably instructive on caring for a baby.

“You’ve had her for a while—let me feed her,” Lincoln offered, and he took charge of Ellie. The baby stared up into his face, eyes wide and solemn, the way only a baby could be. Lincoln smiled at her, and the baby cooed in delight as he offered her the bottle, which she sucked eagerly. Caroline’s heart fluttered. Lincoln was right about ancient instincts taking over. Seeing a man like him holding a baby was stirring all sorts of emotions inside her. She could have taken him right there and then, but she needed to focus on the future. She had to get on the radio to see if anyone else was out there.

“That’s a special military-issue radio. You should be able to cut through any signals currently being broadcast to communicate with anyone out there listening.”

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