Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="orchid blossom" data-source="post: 1859153" data-attributes="member: 12815">Untitledby: orchid blossom"Hold your arm out straight."  Carlene ducked under the arm and looked at the musculature from beneath.  "You could have at least bathed before you came in.""And you could have gotten someone else to do this for you," Aidan shook his head.  "Or at least done it later.  You can't expect me to come in from mucking stalls smelling like a daisy, can you?"Carlene stood back and made another mark with her charcoal pencil."My arms are getting tired.""Just another minute."Aidan shifted his weight from side to side.  "What's the point of this anyway?""I'm supposed to draw the arm and torso, making note of the musculature.  It's part of my studies.""And what are you going to learn from this?"Carlene looked up, one eyebrow raised.  "All the ticklish spots.""Alright with the evil eye already.  I really want to know.""Mrs. Kennedy thinks it's easier to learn things with hands on experience.  So instead of just looking at pictures and memorizing the names of the muscles, by looking and drawing I'm supposed to remember better.""And do you?""Actually, yeah, I do.  It's pretty interesting."Aidan nodded.  "Okay, my arms are getting really tired.""You can put them down, I'm done.  And for heaven's sake put your shirt back on!""Sure, sure.  Use me and then just toss me aside."  Aidan pulled his rough cotton work shirt back over his head and shook his arms to loosen the tight muscles.  "You're coming out to the fair tonight, aren't you?""Of course I am.""Well then, you can make it up to me.""What?""You did it all backwards.  You're supposed to buy me dinner first, and then try to get me out of my clothes," he grinned.Carlene clamped her lips shut and tried not to laugh.  "Out!  Go!"  She chased him out the door and watched as he ran down the path toward his parent’s house.  He turned and ran backwards down the path.   "You're going to dance with me, right?""Only if you bathe first!”……………………………………….The evening air was chilly as Carlene walked down the hill toward the town square.  It had been three months since the last fair, and the village was ready for the party that always accompanied the return of a retrieval team.  The generator had been started for the night, and electrical street lights illuminated the square and stalls.  The teams must have found fuel tanks this time.  She couldn't imagine what it was like before the Plagues, when everyone had electricity all the time.  Living in a crowded city with cars and buses and a machine to do anything you could imagine.  She'd seen those things when she went to the nearest operating hospital for the "modern" part of her training.  Now she was learning the older healing arts as well.  Those with serious problems would be taken to a hospital if they were able to make the trip, but Carlene would be able to take car of things like broken bones, cuts that needed stitches and sicknesses that could be cured through herbal rather than pharmaceutical means.Carlene walked up and down the vendor stalls, looking over the newest arrivals.  There were still plenty of things of use to be found in the cities.  Any food was long spoiled of course, except for the occasional Twinkie, and no one trusted eating something that was still good after 30 years.  But there were plenty of clothes, dishes, books, and just about anything made of plastic you could want.  She made her purchases and had everything set aside to be delivered tomorrow afternoon."Hey, I got you something," Aidan said as he came around a corner.  He held out a package wrapped in plain brown paper.  "Open it."Carlene carefully unwrapped it to expose a bas-relief of the head of a small boy, mounted in a carved wooden frame.  She carefully folded the paper.  "Aidan, it's beautifully done, but, what am I going to do with it?""It's for your shingle.  You know, doctors are supposed to hang out their shingles, right?  We can hang this outside your house, and I'll carve you a name plate to go underneath it.  Come on, we’ll go put this in your delivery crates, and then we’ll get some dinner.”She gave in and bought the dinner and gave Aidan his dance by way of a thank you.  Carlene smiled and laughed as she danced from one song to the next and drank the home brewed beer that had been one of the first things people figured out how to make for themselves. …………………………………."Carlene!  Carlene!"She put down the book on herbs she had been studying and hurried to the door.  It was only a little past noon, early for anyone to be knocking on the day after a Fair.  She opened it just as the man was about to knock again.  "Kieran.  You should be sleeping.  You've been gone for weeks, and then all that unloading yesterday."The retrieval man shook his head.  "Can I come in?"Carlene nodded and moved out of the way.  "Look, we brought back more than just goods yesterday.  We found some people wandering the city.  They said they'd been traveling, retrieving like us.  When they got back to their village no one was there.  So they set off looking for others.""Why didn't you bring them up yesterday?""Well, one of them said they didn't feel so good.  Apparently they've been to a couple other villages that wouldn't take them in.  Places that didn't have a healer and were pretty paranoid about sick people.  Anyway, they seem worse today.  I don't want to bring them up here until someone looks at them.  Can you come?""Me?"  Carlene backed up a step.  "I'm still in training.  I don't know if I'll be able to help at all.  We should get Mrs. Kennedy.""She's delivering a baby."Carlene sighed.  Babies she'd dealt with.  But if those people were really sick then Kieran was exposed, and through him so was she.  She couldn't just go trade places and spread it further.  "Ok, hold on a minute.  Carlene grabbed her bag, threw in a few pairs of the precious rubber gloves and snapped it shut.  "Let's go.”………………………………Aidan shaded his eyes from the sun and peered in the kitchen window.  “Carly?”  She usually worked at the kitchen table.  “Carly?  I have your stuff!”  He knocked on the door again and waited.  Finally he shrugged and opened it.  He piled up her crates of supplies in the hallway and shouted one more time.  She was probably with Mrs. Kennedy.He was on his way back down to the stables when a mechanical hum came to him from the distance.  Down at the bottom of the hill, people were pouring out of their houses.  All eyes were looking down the old road as the automobile bounced over the cracked pavement.  Small children who had never seen one before hid behind their mothers, and even the elders who remembered them looked surprised.  Gasoline was a precious commodity, used only when absolutely needed.Aidan reached the road just as a man stepped out of the car.  He was rail thin and dressed in a pristine black suit.  “You’ve all had retrieval back recently, yes?”“Just a couple days ago, sir.” One of the gathered crowd told him.“Any new people come in with it?”Most of them shook their heads, and a few answered aloud.  The man looked around suspiciously, studying each face until the crowd was squirming.  “Who are the retrievers that came back with the last load?”  A few hands went up and the man gestured for them to come forward.  “Where do you unload?”“We ferry the goods from a larger ship and unload on the east side of the lake.  It gets too shallow to bring the big boat in.”“I’ll need to go out to your main ship.  You may have had stowaways,” he said with a sniff.  “I don’t want to waste my time circling that lake if they never came here.”  The man opened the back door of his auto and a canine nose peeked out.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17260" target="_blank">He reached out and stroked the animal, and it poked its head out further.  Aidan pulled back as he saw the wolf’s eyes.  For a moment, he thought they weren’t there, but a glint of light betrayed a dull black presence.  The man snapped his fingers and it jumped lightly out.</a>Aidan watched as the man moved away with the retrievers and got into the longboat to make the trip out to the main ship.  The chatter in the crowd started quietly, but grew quickly into a loud buzzing.  Aidan slipped away and headed for the storehouse.………………………………Kieran led Carlene down a wide dirt path circling the lake to the storehouse.  The walls were made of wooden slats with wide cracks between them.  “Can’t be much good at keeping the weather out.”“We usually keep tarp over it.  But they kept saying it was stifling in there, so we pulled it off.”  He pushed the door open.  Carlene stepped in and shaded her eyes from the bright sunlight streaming in through the cracks.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17258" target="_blank">There was a little boy sitting against the back wall, and a man in African printed cloth near the door.</a>  “Are these two all there are?”Kieran shook his head.  “Where’s Libby?”The man shook his head.  “She died while you were gone.  Coughing up blood.”Carlene nodded.  “Okay, let’s see what’s going on here.”  She opened her bag and put on her gloves.  The ball bearings she sometimes used to help crush herbs had gotten loose and were scattered all over the inside of the bag.  She shook her head and got down to work.The sun was setting as Carlene confirmed her diagnosis.  If these people had been at home and resting, they would have recovered easily.  “Kieran, I’ll need a small fire to boil some water in.”  She pulled out her mortar and pestle and pulled out a few of the old pieces of tubing she used for cases.  In a few minutes the herbs were crushed and ready and Carlene stood up to stretch.  She walked over to the wall and peered out between the cracks.Kieran was busy striking his flint and steel under a small pile of kindling.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17259" target="_blank">Carlene looked past him at the sun setting over the water.  “Is that a longboat coming over?”</a>  “What?”  Kieran looked up and at the lake.  “Damn!”  He kicked the pile of sticks down and ran back inside.“What’s the matter?”“I think they were tracked.  Listen, there’s people out there who track down the sick and try to keep them from spreading anything.  They’ve been doing it since the Plague.  There’s one of them in that boat.  He’ll kill both of them and us if he finds us.  And he will.  He’ll have a wolf with him, trained to sniff out the sickness.”“So running is not an option?”The Retriever nodded.  “He’d just track us down.”  He moved to the back corner of the room and pulled up a trap door.  “Get them down here.  We’ll hide and pray he thinks they were here and left.”“Why would the others bring him here?”“You don’t say no to a Mortician, Carlene.  Let’s go.”Carlene helped get the two sick people down the steep stairs and ran back up for her bag.  She popped open another tube and poured a fragrant herb into her hand.  She used her fingers to crush it and release the oils and then rubbed it on the outside of the trap door.  “It should confuse the wolf’s sense of smell,” she explained.  She grabbed her mortar and pestle and tossed them down.“Hurry up, Carlene.”“Just one more thing.”  She reached over and pulled on the blanket she had used to cover the body of the dead woman.  It fell down, exposing her face. “Sorry,” she whispered to the spirit of the woman and hoped she wouldn’t mind being a decoy to save the rest of them.Carlene could hear voices outside as she ran back down the stairs and started pulling the trap door down over her.  “My bag,” she whispered urgently, starting back up again.“Too late, leave it!”  Kieran pulled her back down and caught the trap door, keeping it from slamming loudly.……………………………..Aidan whistled as he pushed a wheelbarrow down toward the storehouse.  The strange man in the suit was just coming up the path as Aidan arrived.“You there!  What are you doing?”  “Just getting some supplies.  Still people waiting on their deliveries.”The man in the suit sneered.  “You’ll have to wait.”  He opened the storehouse door and the wolf trotted in growling.  Aidan watched as it trotted straight to a blanket covered pile in the corner.  There was a combination of smells coming from the room, but strongest was a sweet, herbal smell that tickled his memory.  “Dead,” the man in the suit said as the wolf poked his nose at the body.  Aidan coughed and turned his eyes away from the animal.  The man whistled again and the wolf backed off and sniffed the rest of the room.  It was interested in a spot by the door, as well as one by the back wall, but it kept sneezing when it tried to go near the back corner or near a black bag that was sitting on the floor.“Recognize that?” the man said, picking up the bag and walking over to the door.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17257" target="_blank">Aidan looked down and saw the drawing that Carlene had been making of him yesterday tucked beneath her medical supplies.  It didn’t look a bit like him.</a>  Aidan shook his head.  “Nope.”The man held it out to the retrievers who’d brought him out. “Any of you?”  Most of them were shaking their heads, but one noticed Aidan nodding from behind the man.  “Uh, yeah.  Yeah I picked that up.  Healers always wanting stuff like that.  You should take that up to Mrs. Kennedy, Aidan.”“Soon as the man gives the okay.”The wolf went back in the room and sniffed again, each time coming out sneezing.  Finally the man seemed satisfied that the body was the only sick person there.  “Take that out and burn it,” he told the Retrievers, “And cover you hands, noses, and mouths when you do it.  That path go back to the village?”They waited until the Mortician was out of sight and then rushed into the storehouse.  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Aidan called out.The trap door flopped open and Carlene stuck her head out.  “I’ve heard of playing hard to get, girl, but this is ridiculous.”……………………………………"Be careful up there, Aidan.  I don't want you to be my first patient."  Carlene coughed.  She’d been sick herself after treating the people the Retrievers had brought back, but as she suspected, it wasn’t a serious illness as long as it was treated right away.  She’d spent a week in the storehouse nursing them back to health, and they now lived in the village.  The little boy, Charlie, had been taken in by one of the families at the bottom of the hill and was outside now, playing in his yard with the other children."I'm being careful.  Why did you let me buy such a heavy shingle?"  He grunted and lifted the heavy metal and wood bas-relief.  The metal hooks bounced against the sign a few times before Aidan managed to get them in the loops he'd screwed into the wood.  He slowly transferred the weight from his hands to the chains.Carlene picked up the name plate and ran her fingers over the delicately carved letters of her name.  She handed it to Aidan and he hung the much lighter piece from the bottom of her "shingle."<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17261" target="_blank">She looked up at the picture of the young boy and smiled.</a></blockquote>

Verification