Page 1 of The Hero Within
Chapter One
Wastelands,2149
"We've gotanother case of plague," Meredith Hammerstein called.
Eden McClain's heart sank through the bottom of her chest. "Give me a moment," she said to Billy, trying to feign a smile. Dragging the stethoscope down around her neck and moving away from the teenager on the trundle, she shoved aside the flaps of the tent she was working in. Two of Absolution's men were holding a stretcher with a limp body slumped on it beneath a blanket. It could be anyone. Friend, neighbor, or enemy....
"Who?"
"Ian Carver," Meredith said.
Jesus.Ian had been with the town since the beginning, when Eden's brother forged Absolution out of virtually nothing. Ian had dandled her on his knee when she was a little girl and followed her brother here after the bloodied night that tore her family—and her village—apart when she was eighteen. In this violent wasteland she called home, all the townsfolk were practically family, but Ian was the grandfather she'd never had.
Eden twitched aside the blanket, revealing his gaunt face. He was sixty if he was a day, and though the red rash across his cheeks and dry, cracked lips looked like they'd only come through in the last couple of hours, he wouldn't last the usual course of infection by the look of it.
"Ian," she whispered, her heart breaking.
Delirious eyes met hers. He frowned, and then sucked at his dry mouth. "Edie...."
"I've got you," she said, the doctor in her taking over, even when her heart squeezed like it was about to send her into cardiac arrest. "Joe and Connor, set him up in the next tent over. I want an IV rigged into his arm, and start him on fluids. Make sure you set the containment up properly and disinfect yourselves, then find HAZMAT suits. You're both drafted."
The two men looked at each other. Grown men who quaked at the signs of plague, and the threat they could be next.
"Now," she stressed, setting her hands on her hips. "Before this gets loose in the general population."
Too late for that.But she didn't know what else to do.
She was a healer, damn it. Her duties ran the gamut of broken limbs, herbal remedies, births, and minor surgeries. The people of the Wastelands didn't have access to the fancy hospitals she'd heard the Eastern Confederacy used—sterile buildings created specifically for medicine, or so she could only dream—so she was it.
But everyone was looking to her as if she would have the answers to this, and Eden didn't have a clue.
The salt plague, some of them had taken to calling it.
Or the sweats.
"That's twelve cases." Meredith met her eyes.
"I'm well aware of that, thanks," she shot back, slipping out of the battered old HAZMAT suit she'd taken to wearing. Nobody knew what caused the salt plague. Not yet, anyway. It was bacterial in nature, but she didn't know how it spread. In the absence of that information, she'd taken to using all the precautions she could, including dosing herself with a prophylactic antibiotic. She'd felt guilty about wasting the medication when it could have been used on actual plague victims, but the council who ruled Absolution had ordered all medical staff start treating themselves, and she understood the precaution.
If her medical team went down, they were all dead.
Most of the infection cases had occurred in those who worked on the farms, and it hadn't hit the actual town until now. Infected body fluids were definitely a no-go zone, but from her questioning there'd been isolated incidences where patientshadn'tcome into contact with any body fluids or dead animals. One of the outrangers hadn't even come across a human until he roared into town on his motorbike and promptly collapsed in the dirt, begging for water.
Which left a damned mystery she needed to solve.
Something was spreading the disease.
But what?
"What are we going to do, Eden?" Meredith asked.
"I'm working on it."
The problem was, with her limited resources out here in the Wastelands there wasn't a damned lot she could do. Tugging off her plastic gloves, Eden threw them at the medical waste—which was a fancy way of saying the trash can someone would burn the contents of later. Then she washed her hands before she brushed her hair out of her eyes.
She had nothing.
No, she had less than nothing.
