The VFMS Spark | Page 35

But Winona never cared about how they looked- only that they had saved her from the dumps of ashes and radioactive sludge and nursed her back into her health and memory. But the NWP had carried on as planned, and now Winona was the one doing the saving, as Cir was gone. It was her retribution to them, her way of carrying on what Cir had done for her all those years ago.

“Ssssh,” Fifteen whispered as Winona creaked the hospital door open, leaning her scythe up against the wall outside. “Don’t want to disturb Chel.”

“Pardon me,” Winona whispered back, opening the door slower. Rachel laid on the bed inside of the room, eyes closed and lips dried, his breathing slow, as if he was dying. They had found him out in the abandoned wasteland of a city outside of the hospital. As he laid on the ground dying, the desertification of the world closed in around him, leeching the life away from his body. The effects of the world took their toll on all of them, forcing them to inhabit the bits of earth that still had even a little bit of water.

When some of Winona’s saved children had found Rachel, they brought him back to the hospital, and Winona slowly nursed him back to health with the supplies they had. She wanted to save him, save the boy that seemed to have fallen from nowhere into her care.

“Why’s his name Rachel if he’s a guy?” Fifteen asked one day as they sat in Rachel’s room, light filtering in between the cracks in the plywood.

“Gunter knew him,” Winona replied, referring to another one of the NWP members, “and said it was because that was his mother’s name. He never really got another one, just like you.”

“Oh,” Fifteen said, looking back down at her tablet. “Let’s call him Chel then. It’s more of a boy name.”

“We’ll ask him about it when he wakes up,” Winona sighed.

They hadn’t asked him yet, since he hadn’t woken up. As Winona opened up the door, she saw that he was awake, but just… not alive, like the rest of them. He was a zombie. But she never told Fifteen that, since she didn’t want her to know that another one of them was hurt.

Fifteen sat in a plastic chair across the room and opened the tablet back up, starting to read again. Winona pressed the red cup to Rachel’s lips and tried to make him drink it, but his dry lips were apprehensive to the feel.

“Come on, boy,” Winona muttered, taking her left hand and slowly opening his lips. “If you don’t drink now, I don’t know when you’ll get water again.”

She managed to get all of the drink down his throat, an eminent improvement over the last time she had tried to get anything into his stomach. He was too sick to chew, so she had to pump fluids into his stomach that she found in the hospital’s basement.

“Do you want to stay here with Rachel, Fifteen?” Winona asked, setting the cup down at the edge of the bed, for there weren’t any tables in the room. Fifteen nodded, engrossed in her novel, and Winona walked out of the room, taking her scythe and setting it over her left shoulder as she walked.

“Ninety-eight bottles of pop on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of pop.”

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