Cyrus had seen his mother’s face as she’d left the room. Something was wrong.
Incredibly wrong.
Between the girl’s cold flashes, the sweating, and the lingering pain even after he’d touched the injured leg, he had no doubt something was wrong.
He went to his mother in the kitchen where she had begun to heat up water for the girl’s beverage. He knew he was his mother’s son, because when he came in, he saw her with her fingers pressed against the sides of her nose.
“Mom, what’s wrong with her?” he asked, keeping the mortified feeling out of his voice.
She looked up, and brought her hand away from her face and put her finger to her mouth; the universal term for ‘shh’. She motioned for him to follow her into the pantry.
He did so, and turned the light on as he walked in. Lucky for them, the pantry was rather spacious.
She started talking without needing to be questioned.
“Cyrus, I looked at her leg this morning.” she said as if that actually meant something to him.
When she awaited his response he said, “And?...”
“It’s infected. The tissue around the original lesion is twice the size that it was when she fell asleep. It’s tender, and pinkish. And I swear I started to see her veins flare up…” her voice grew quiet when it came to the end of her sentence.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the infection is starting to go to her heart, Cyrus. It means if we can’t cure her, she’ll die.”
Cyrus had nothing to say to that.
And for some reason, his stomach flipped. The thought of this girl’s death was unbearable to him. After all she’d been through?
He found himself thinking that he’d rather die first.
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The Mindless Man's Paradise
Teen FictionIn The Land, nobody has names. There are no such things as weddings, culture, ethnicities, or cities. In a post apocalyptic era, taking place in the only habitable part of the world, all survivors of the last war gather. Under their government's co...
